It is no wonder that every single one of the contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination would lose to President Bush if the election were held today, as poll after poll has demonstrated. Aside from Senator Lieberman, not one of the Democrats has staked out a serious position on the Iraq war. There has been flip-flopping. General Clark supported it and now he opposes it, Senator Kerry voted for it and now he opposes it. But, more importantly, there has been an utter failure to confront the moral seriousness of the decision that Mr. Bush made in determining to oust a mass-murdering dictator who was bent on attaining weapons of mass destruction.

The Democratic candidates were in their regular form in Tuesday night’s debate at Durham, N.H., carried by ABC News and moderated by Ted Koppel. There was Rep. Dennis Kucinich. “No more Halliburton sweetheart deals, no more war-profiteering,” the congressman said. Then there was the Reverend Al Sharpton. “Americans are dying around what cause and purpose? I eulogized a young man in Orangeburg, South Carolina, four weeks ago. Young, 23-year-old man died 11 days before his birthday at war in Iraq. For what purpose? For Halliburton contracts?” he said.

Among the more serious candidates, Mr. Kerry also trotted out the Halliburton trope. General Clark, supposedly a sane alternative to Governor Dean, said, “I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe in occupying countries to extract their natural resources. I think you buy them on the world market.” And the good doctor himself, Dr. Dean, played up his recent endorsement by the losing presidential candidate in 2000, Vice President Gore, saying, “We both believe the war in Iraq was put forward on the American people unjustly because we were not told the truth about why we’re there.”

Perhaps it’s hard to get hold of a newspaper on the campaign trail, but Dr. Dean might want to look at the president’s state of the union address from earlier this year and compare it to a series of reports coming in from the Associated Press on the atrocities that transpired in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

It may be true that Mr. Bush spent some of the time selling an invasion of Iraq on national security grounds. But he, and most of those who supported the war, never forgot about the brutality of Saddam’s regime as experienced by the Iraqi people. “The dictator who is assembling the world’s most dangerous weapons has already used them on whole villages — leaving thousands of his own citizens dead, blind, or disfigured,” Mr. Bush said in his 2003 state of the union address. “Iraqi refugees tell us how forced confessions are obtained — by torturing children while their parents are made to watch. International human rights groups have catalogued other methods used in the torture chambers of Iraq: electric shock, burning with hot irons, dripping acid on the skin, mutilation with electric drills, cutting out tongues, and rape. If this is not evil, then evil has no meaning.”

“Tonight I have a message for the brave and oppressed people of Iraq,” the president said. “Your enemy is not surrounding your country — your enemy is ruling your country. And the day he and his regime are removed from power will be the day of your liberation.”

Reading the reports out of Iraq these days it seems difficult to argue that the president was wrong. “The killers kept bankers hours,” began a dispatch by the AP earlier this month. “Every day, witnesses say, the routine was the same: The backhoes dug a trench. Fifty people were led to the edge of the hole and shot, one by one, in the head. The backhoes covered them with dirt. Sometimes the gunmen couldn’t keep up and people were simply pushed into the pit to be buried alive. Then the backhoes dug another hole and the next group was led to their deaths. At 5 p.m., the killers — officials of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party — went home to rest up for another day of slaughter.”

“It’s as easy to find mass graves in Iraq as it once was to find oil,” the AP quotes a lawyer with Iraq’s new Human Rights Ministry, Adnan Jabbar al-Saadi, as saying.

This is something of a different spin on the liberal formulation regarding blood and oil. The AP report was from Mahaweel, which, with more than 31,000 sets of remains, is the largest of some 270 mass graves discovered so far in Iraq. The individuals murdered here were dispatched over 35 days in March and April of 1991, during Saddam’s crackdown on the Shiite Muslim uprising following the first Gulf War. A survey conducted by Gallup in Baghdad found that some 61,000 residents of that city may have been murdered by Saddam’s regime. The Gallup survey of 1,178 Baghdad residents found that 6.6% of Baghdad residents had had a member of their household executed by Saddam’s regime.

Not every mass murder is one that can be stopped by an American invasion. America’s power is not infinite. But the American death toll from the invasion and occupation of Iraq so far is 453. Now, maybe Dr. Dean’s view and that of the other Democrats is that the mass murder of 31,000 at Mahaweel, along with 61,000 in Baghdad, isn’t enough to justify the loss of 453 Americans to prevent further mass murders. It’s a rather isolationist, America-first view from a group of candidates who spend a lot of time on the campaign trail berating Mr. Bush for being insufficiently involved in the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Treaty, and the like.

Historically, level-headed Democrats have advocated for intervention in atrocious slaughters, such as in the Balkans and Rwanda. Yet, somehow, the present group consistently ignores the evidence of Saddam’s mass killings, preferring instead to proffer rhetoric about oil and Halliburton. This is likely to get only worse if any actual evidence of war profiteering emerges. Dr. Dean leaped on news yesterday of a Pentagon audit that found Halliburton may have overcharged the government for gasoline in Iraq, issuing a press release of his own about it, as did Rep. Richard Gephardt.

Neither one of them issued a press release when the mass graves were discovered. Maybe Dr. Dean was off skiing on the day that his high school history class learned about the allegations of profiteering against military contractors in the Civil War and in World War II. Just because companies made money selling uniforms, rifles, and food for the troops in those wars doesn’t mean that it was wrong for America to go to war to free the slaves or defeat the Nazis.

Only Mr. Lieberman has shown any sense at all on the issue. “I supported the war against Saddam Hussein. And I didn’t need George Bush to convince me of that,”he said Tuesday.”I decided a long time ago…this man is a homicidal dictator, killed hundreds of thousands of his people, invaded two of his neighbors, used chemical weapons, supported terrorism and suppressed the rights of his people. He was a danger to us, a ticking time bomb. I’m glad that he is gone.”

Mr. Lieberman, at least, is aware of history. His wife, Hadassah, was born in Prague in 1948 to a mother who survived Auschwitz and a father who escaped the Nazis during a forced march toward Auschwitz in 1945. We’d wager that Hadassah, at least, reading the AP report of the trench at Mahaweel where more than 31,000 perished, couldn’t help but to think of Babi Yar, on the outskirts of Kiev, where 33,000 Jews were machine-gunned into a pit in September of 1941. It is President Bush’s own great achievement that even without such a close personal connection or narrow escape from unspeakable evil, he understood the need, in Iraq, to confront and defeat it.