With his reasons for going to war against Iraq crumbling faster than he can build new ones, President Bush might turn for help from a couple of unofficial sources, and not necessarily conservative ones.

North Korea pierced the administration’s arguments for the immediate necessity of attacking Iraq. If Kim Jong Il could have weapons of mass destruction, pick fights in his neighborhood, fall into axis-of-evil class but require just a good diplomatic scolding in the view of the administration, the case for sending in the jets over Baghdad falls apart.

But the most prominent reasons given by the administration are not the only ones able to make a case for war, and opponents might consider two recent commentaries on the subject. One comes from the Washington Post last November. “A Liberal Argument for Regime Change” was written by Salman Rushdie, who dismisses much of the administration’s argument for war with Iraq, substituting his own, bluntly. Mr. Rushdie wrote the following about Saddam Hussein’s assault on his own people:

“He had impoverished them, murdered them, gassed and tortured them, sent them off to die by the tens of thousands in futile wars, repressed them, gagged them, bludgeoned them and then murdered them some more.

“Saddam Hussein and his ruthless gang of cronies from his home village of Tikrit are homicidal criminals, and their Iraq is a living hell. This obvious truth is no less true because we have been turning a blind eye to it – and ‘we’ includes, until recently, the government of the United States, an early and committed supporter of ‘secular’ Hussein against the ‘fanatical’ Islamic religionists of the region.”

Any defender of human rights, anyone who truly looks at Iraq under Hussein, with or without the failing economic sanctions and despite the other ideas the Bush administration has for the region, he says, must “join the Americans and British in ridding the world of this vile despot and his cohorts.”

But isn’t a war on Iraq just about controlling its oil? Yes, partly, says Thomas Friedman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist at The New York Times, who argues the administration imagines Hussein with weapons sufficient to let him control the Persian Gulf and therefore the world’s largest source of oil. But more to the point, Mr. Friedman said in a column that appeared the day the administration let it be known it would likely occupy Iraq for more than a year as the nation was rebuilt, “I have no problem with a war for oil – if we accompany it with a real program for energy conservation” and … “the Bush team, and the American people, prove willing to stay in Iraq and pay the full price, in money and manpower, needed to help Iraqis build a more progressive, democratizing Arab state – one that would use its oil income for the benefit of all its people and serve as a model for its neighbors.”

Despite the many ways opponents of the war have dismantled the administration’s arguments on this issue, the charge that Hussein is a dangerous despot, cruel to his own people and has the possibility of controlling a major part of the world’s economy, remains to be answered. The opposition in Congress should respond.