THE IMPERIAL presidency is back, and it looks like we may have a good, old-fashioned war with Iraq to show for it.

Never mind that our allies in Europe and the Middle East don't want the war. Never mind that lots of people in the Pentagon, State Department, and Congress (including House Majority Leader Dick Armey) don't seem to want it. And never mind that the Kurds in Northern Iraq aren't too keen on the idea, either.

You can also forget all that legalistic mumbo-jumbo--like how an Iraq invasion would violate international law and the U.N. Charter, or how the constitution assigns to Congress the power to declare war.

What matters is that the president and other chicken hawks holding his hand (Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz) want a war--and maybe more than just one.

In all fairness, it should be noted that the White House has received quite a bit of help in putting the country on a fast track to war. Last week's Senate hearings on Iraq, along with the shoddy work of stenographers masquerading as journalists (you may have read examples of this work in our newspaper), have gone a long way toward making war seem inevitable.

The largely unquestioned assumption being peddled by the White House, senators such as Richard Shelby, and a (mostly) compliant media is that Saddam Hussein poses an imminent threat to the United States. The conclusion that necessarily follows is that we should take him out now, before he can further develop any weapons of mass destruction.

There's a problem, though, with the assumption, as Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told me in a phone interview this week: "There isn't any evidence being presented" to back it up.

Hans von Sponeck, a former U.N. humanitarian aid coordinator for Iraq who returned recently from a two-week stay in the country, went a step further than Bennis in a July 22 commentary for the London Guardian: "The U.S. Department of Defense and the CIA know perfectly well that today's Iraq poses no threat to anyone in the region, let alone in the United States. To argue otherwise is dishonest."