Just in time for Memorial Day, Rep. Anthony Weiner is going around town announcing, in essence, that our GIs slain in Iraq have died in vain. Mr. Weiner has been saying to Democratic groups as he campaigns for mayor that if he knew then what he knows now, he wouldn’t have voted for the Iraq war. Mr. Weiner is busy campaigning and serving in Congress, so he wouldn’t have had time to stop by the Council on Foreign Relations last week to hear the remarks of a former weapons inspector in Iraq, Charles Duelfer.

It’s too bad, because Mr. Duelfer, while not opining on the war’s merits, gave what sounded to us like some convincing justifications for it. Speaking of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, Mr. Duelfer said, “There was an intent to try to restart those programs.” He went on, “In the biological area, Saddam had that capability on the shelf.”

Had America and the United Nations certified that Iraq was disarmed, the sanctions might have come off, and Iraq could well have built more weapons, Mr. Duelfer speculated. Would it have been better for American troops to go after Saddam when he had the weapons of mass destruction to use on American troops?

These columns have long argued that the best case for liberating Iraq related not primarily to disarmament but to the nature of the regime and the logic of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. But now, after seeing the credible reports of mass graves in Iraq containing the bodies of 30,000 Shiites, after knowing that Saddam was paying awards of $15,000 or $25,000 to families of suicide bombers attacking Israel, Mr. Weiner doesn’t think the war was right. It does give voters at least one good argument for putting him in City Hall. It’d be a post with little or no foreign-policy responsibility, unlike his current job in Congress.

Not to be too harsh on Mr. Weiner, a most likable person who has done fine work promoting American recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and fighting anti-Israel bias on the Columbia University faculty. We doubt any of the Democrats running for mayor would do much better on foreign policy; one Weiner rival, Council Speaker Gifford Miller, voted for an anti-war resolution in the City Council back when Mr. Weiner still was on the right side of the issue. Still, we wish Mr. Weiner would spend a little less time worrying about the message he’s sending to liberal Democratic voters in the New York mayoral primary, and a little more time thinking about the message he’s sending the brave American troops still on the ground helping to secure Iraq.