Oh, we get it now, thanks to William Safire. This, the “guerrilla war” we’re just now acknowledging as a reality, was Saddam Hussein’s plan all along: Forget fighting a conventional war and instead defeat the U.S. through “a war of attrition.” How odd no one in the White House or Pentagon gave that any thought whatsoever.

“How best to deny Saddam’s putative return from his Elba, and to put this summer of discontent behind us?” Safire asks.

First and foremost, and providing the quote of the day, he says, “Drop the premature conclusion that if we can’t yet find proof of the destructive weapons, they never existed. That’s like saying because we haven’t found Osama or Saddam, those killers never existed.”

How convenient that we should forget about all that -- and how absurd a comparison. Not to let the Bush administration off the hook for failing to nab either Public Enemy No. 1 or Public Enemy No. 2, but finding one man, and, presumably, his ragtag companions, is hardly on a par with uncovering irrefutable evidence of a vast program of developing and stockpiling weapons of mass destruction, supposedly ready for use within a 45-minute window.

Poor Safire, he’s so used to working for, with, and on behalf of liars -- Nixon, Agnew, Bush, Starr, Sharon, and Bush -- he can no longer do anything else.