Senator Kerry emerged from his debate preparations yesterday to utter an amazing untruth. He claimed that the report of American weapons inspector Charles Duelfer demonstrated, with respect to Saddam Hussein, that “The sanctions had prevented him – and the inspections – from being able to rebuild.” The New York Times made the same argument yesterday in an editorial that began, “Sanctions worked.”

In fact, the Duelfer report issued this week demonstrates nothing of the sort. On the contrary, the report describes a sanctions regime that is as leaky as Mr. Kerry’s logic. The report says that the American survey group in Iraq “has uncovered numerous examples of Iraq’s disregard for UN sanctions and resolutions in an effort to improve its missile “and unmanned aerial vehicle capabilities. The report says “these violations repeatedly breached” U.N. Security Council resolutions 687, 707, 715, 1051, 1284 and 1441. The report said “Iraq’s restoration of prohibited equipment associated with past missile programs directly violated UN restrictions on Iraq’s missile programs.”

The Duelfer report says that even after 2000, “Prohibited goods and weapons were being shipped into Iraq with virtually no problem.” The report said Iraq had contracts with Syrian companies between 2000 and 2003 for $1.2 billion worth of goods prohibited by the U.N. sanctions, including “Antitank guided missiles, rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns, and 20 million machinegun rounds.” The Duelfer report also says that the U.N. career bureaucrat in charge of the Iraq “oil-for-food” program under the sanctions, Benon Sevan, received “illicit oil allocations” of 7.3 million barrels.

The Massachusetts senator has pronounced the Iraq war a mistake. Mr. Kerry has taken so many positions on the Iraq war that it’s hard to know what he would have done, but his present position seems to be that he would have preferred sanctions to war. “You wouldn’t lift the sanctions,” he said yesterday. It would be amusing to see him try to justify the indefinite continuation of those sanctions consistent with his current apparent position that Saddam had no illicit weapons and was not cheating.

But as the Duelfer report details, the sanctions were not working. A top United Nations official was – in any normal situation it would be an astounding story – on the take from Iraq. Saddam’s officials were secretly rebuilding missile programs that they had told the U.N. they had destroyed. Companies in another terrorist sponsoring state, Syria, were supplying Iraq with $1.2 billion worth of prohibited materials. Even Mr. Kerry conceded yesterday that after all the years of sanctions, Saddam “still presented a threat.”

The senator, for all his shrill statements about Duelfer, is still full of contradictions. He is still dodging the central issue. He is still getting between America and her enemies. In contrast, after the attacks of September 11, 2001, Mr. Bush decided not to leave American security in the hands of a United Nations official who was on the take. He decided not to rely on a U.N. sanctions program so leaky that the Syrians could sign $1.2 billion worth of weapons contracts with Saddam. He did exactly what he told the Congress he would do in the speeches he delivered after September 11, 2001.

Mr. Bush reacted to the Duelfer report with a statement yesterday emphasizing that the report demonstrated that American intelligence was “wrong.” But the facts are better than that. The Duelfer report is persuasive evidence that Mr. Bush was right to go to war and that he is choosing the correct policy today when he says “I’ll never hand over America’s security decisions to foreign leaders and international bodies that do not have America’s interests at heart.” And it is evidence that Mr. Kerry would have put American security at risk by relying on a leaky system of sanctions to protect America and the rest of the Middle East from Saddam.