He warned us. On Jan. 27, 2003, Mohamed ElBaradei told the United Nations Security Council that his initial inspections had revealed no evidence of nuclear-weapons activities in Iraq. The next day, ignoring this new intelligence, President George W. Bush presented an urgent case for military action in his State of the Union address, and The New York Times, The Washington Post, and most leading experts followed Bush's lead: Saddam was building a bomb, and war was the only way to stop him.