When Europeans make such criticisms, Americans assume we're envious. "They want what we've got," the thinking goes, "and if they can't get it, they're going to stop us from having it." But does everyone want what America has? Well, we like some of it but could do without the rest: among the highest rates of violent crime, economic inequality, functional illiteracy, incarceration and drug use in the developed world. President Bush recently declared that the U.S. was "the single surviving model of human progress." Maybe some Americans think this self-evident, but the rest of us see it as a clumsy arrogance born of ignorance.

Europeans tend to regard free national health services, unemployment benefits, social housing and so on as pretty good models of human progress. We think it's important — civilized, in fact — to help people who fall through society's cracks. This isn't just altruism, but an understanding that having too many losers in society hurts everyone. It's better for everybody to have a stake in society than to have a resentful underclass bent on wrecking things. To many Americans, this sounds like socialism, big government, the nanny state. But so what? The result is: Europe has less gun crime and homicide, less poverty and arguably a higher quality of life than the U.S., which makes a lot of us wonder why America doesn't want some of what we've got.

Too often, the U.S. presents the "American way" as the only way, insisting on its kind of free-market Darwinism as the only acceptable "model of human progress." But isn't civilization what happens when people stop behaving as if they're trapped in a ruthless Darwinian struggle and start thinking about communities and shared futures? America as a gated community won't work, because not even the world's sole superpower can build walls high enough to shield itself from the intertwined realities of the 21st century. There's a better form of security: reconnect with the rest of the world, don't shut it out; stop making enemies and start making friends. Perhaps it's asking a lot to expect America to act differently from all the other empires in history, but wasn't that the original idea?

Uttered last September by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, the best line has been repeated ominously many times since: "We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Mr. Bush warned last fall that, according to our intelligence sources, "Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear-weapons program… Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear program in the past. Iraq has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes and other equipment needed for gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. We don’t know whether or not he has a nuclear weapon. He recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, according to the British government... And he is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon."

After three months of inspections by the United Nations—underwritten by the threat of military force—we now know that those warnings were grossly exaggerated. Iraq has not reconstituted the extensive nuclear-weapons program dismantled during the previous round of U.N. inspections. The facilities in the U.S. satellite photographs are still in shambles, and aren’t being used for any illegal purpose. The aluminum tubes were unusable for uranium enrichment. And the documents that show Saddam tried to buy uranium from Africa, which were cited by the President in his State of the Union address? Oh, they were forged.

Those classified papers, provided by Britain’s MI6 and then intensively reviewed by the C.I.A., were brandished as proof that Iraq had attempted to purchase uranium from Niger in 1999. Officials from both countries denied any such deal, and the U.N.’s independent experts confirmed their denials, finding that the documents had been crudely faked. (Another published description was "transparently obvious.")

The revelation of that fraud marked the second severe embarrassment to Anglo-American intelligence in a single month. The first occurred within days after Mr. Powell’s presentation to the U.N. Security Council, when the British were forced to admit that their analysts had plagiarized some of the material cited by America’s chief diplomat from a California graduate student.

So far, spokesmen for the U.S. and British governments have not tried to deny that the uranium documents were bogus. Asked about the fake papers by Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, Mr. Powell replied blandly: "If that information is inaccurate, fine."

With all due respect to the Secretary, the appropriate word isn’t "inaccurate"—and it isn’t "fine," either. It is horrific to contemplate that someone would fabricate a document to foment a war likely to kill thousands. It is humiliating to think that American intelligence services cannot distinguish a fake of that kind—or, worse still, would consciously pass along such a fake to an international authority. It is troubling to realize that the quality of information used by the President as he prepares for war may be no better than that.

And it is impossible not to wonder what other lies and myths are being spread to justify this war.