WASHINGTON &045; The great unmentionables finally got mentioned three paragraphs from the end of the president’s 34-minute address at the U.S. Army War College.

&uot;They seek weapons of mass destruction,&uot; President Bush said of

&uot;the terrorists,&uot; the moniker he affixes to insurgents of all stripes who have brought the U.S. occupation in Iraq to the brink of something.

We do not yet know what.

We no longer talk about the weapons of mass destruction &045;

at least we do not speak of the weapons of mass destruction that were supposed to

be in Saddam Hussein’s hands.

These, we were once told, constituted a grave threat that was &uot;gathering against us,&uot; in the president’s words &045;

a menace so profound in its implication that the commander in chief sent America’s young to war. Bush has not talked much about these weapons since February, when he succumbed to political pressure and appointed a special panel to study why the weapons turned out not to exist in Iraq. The panel’s report won’t come until after the November election.

But we must talk about the weapons of mass destruction now.

We must talk about them because the consensus of complaint among those who found the president’s Iraq speech to be wanting, and who are troubled by grimness enveloping Iraq, is that there is no workable plan for extricating ourselves. It is all a wish and a hope, a bundle of noble intentions strung together with a newfound fondness for the United

Nations. And with more of a burden on the American troops.

The common wisdom now congealing is that we’ve botched the occupation. This is, of course, the current problem. But it is a convenient half-truth, and a self-delusional one.

The full truth is that the blunder is deeper and darker and will take more to remedy than a United Nations resolution and a few reconstruction contracts thrown toward the French. The United States has, in the Iraq adventure, destroyed its credibility. It has ruined its reputation as the world’s principled purveyor of democratic ideals &045;

the Abu Ghraib prison scandal alone diminishes our claim to be the last, best hope of man on Earth.

The reliance on the hustler Ahmed Chalabi to provide intelligence on weapons of mass destruction is more than a national embarrassment. It is a full-blown, taxpayer-financed scandal that has endangered the servicemen and women sent abroad to track down a phantom menace. It played into the hands of the Iranian ayatollahs, friends of Chalabi and members in good standing of the axis of evil.

The New York Times, in a note &uot;from the editors&uot; published Wednesday, at long last admitted it was duped by Chalabi and his hangers-on. The White House has not yet suffered such a pang of conscience.

Nor has it &045;

or we &045;

confronted the most horrible truth of the American fiasco in Iraq. It has swelled the ranks of terrorists around the world. It has fortified al Qaeda. It has placed the soldiers and the citizens of the United States and of allied countries in greater danger.

The Iraq conflict has enticed al Qaeda recruits from across Islamic nations, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London-based think tank held in high regard. It has focused the terrorist network’s energies and resources, while simultaneously diluting those of the global counterterrorism coalition necessary to fight it. The Madrid bombings in March were evidence that al Qaeda &uot;had fully reconstituted, set its sights firmly on the United States and its closest Western allies in Europe and established a new and effective modus operandi that increasingly exploited local affiliates,&uot; the institute says.

This is much the same conclusion the CIA has reached. It is the conclusion of any number of academic experts on terrorism. The war in Iraq has energized so many disparate local terror groups that they no longer need a central organizing point, such as Afghanistan under the Taliban, to thrive and to strike.

Now our government says beware this summer of people carrying backpacks, or wearing heavy clothing from which wires protrude. It is tempting to call the whole escapade a farce. But there is nothing funny about it. And it will not be made right by a speech, or by anything short of replacing those who’ve sent us into this abyss.

(Marie Cocco’s e-mail address is cocco@newsday.com.)