HOW IMPORTANT is the truth as America confronts Iraq? Enormously.

People in some parts of the world are not accustomed to the truth and do not expect to get it. The condition of their lives reflects as much.

A Syrian pundit once told me about a proverb which I found dubious but nonetheless appropriate to events in the Middle East.

"There is nothing more beautiful than a well-constructed lie," he said.

Certainly the truth is an elusive commodity in the region. In my own experience as a correspondent there in the 1970s and 1980s, my colleagues and I thought it simply didn't exist.

The Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Egyptians and Iraqis seemed capable of the grossest distortions of events.

Once in 1975 when I was in Iraq to cover the "joyful" return of the Kurds from Iran, where they had been menacing the Iraqis with the help of the CIA, we were taken from village to village where Kurds in colorful costumes were celebrating the repatriation. In the distance, we heard shooting and asked to be taken to that scene.

It's nothing, said our Iraqi military escort. They are just celebrating. Actually, the returning Kurds were being shot on sight as they crossed the border. And this was before Saddam Hussein formally took over as president. He didn't shoot Kurds. He gassed them.

The Israelis also are capable of gross prevarication. Consider such assertions as: Israel does not have nuclear weapons. The Israeli army (in its 1982 invasion of Lebanon) will never occupy Beirut.

After the massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin laid a charge of "blood libel" on those holding the Israeli army accountable because they had the camps surrounded when Christian militiamen went in to slaughter hundreds of Palestinians.

Later, an Israeli inquiry held the army and then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon accountable.

In that respect, certainly, the truth ultimately was told. This was more than anyone would dare say of one of the great Syrian lies of about the same time, the coverup of the Syrian army's massacre of up to 15,000 people in the city of Hamma in 1982, when Syrians there demonstrated opposition to the regime of the late Hafez el Assad.

As for Yasser Arafat, the leader of the Palestinians, his capacity for distortion is infinite. One need go no further than his consistent denials of any measure of responsibility for the multitude of deadly attacks against Israeli civilians in the past two years.

This all comes to mind because of the great piece of creative writing delivered to the United Nations last week by Iraq. It was a nine-page letter which grudgingly acquiesced to the return of United Nations inspectors to look for weapons of mass destruction.

"Iraq has not developed weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, chemical or biological as claimed by evil people," the letter proclaimed.

We shall see about that. Maybe.

The letter is also full of requirements from the Iraqis with respect to timing and assurances that the inspections won't be infected by "the whims of the American administration, the Zionist desires, their followers, intelligence services" and so forth.

Apart from the assertion that no weapons of mass destruction have been developed by Iraq, references elsewhere refer to such weapons not being developed since 1998, when U.N. inspectors last were in Iraq.

The letter is full of caveats and a few sayings that are almost as splendid as the one about beautiful lies told to me by the pundit in Damascus years ago.

"Remorse will not do any good for those who bite on their fingers."

"It would be better to take the kicks of a raging bull in a small circle than to face its horns in an open space."

"He who remains silent in the defense of truth is a dumb devil."

I like that last one best. Not because I think that Saddam Hussein believes it, but because I think Americans need to think about it. The people of the Middle East don't have an exclusive franchise on tampering with the truth.

Hussein's letter seems to set the stage for all sorts of diplomatic chicanery that will make President Bush very angry. And the angrier he gets, the more he is going to want to go to war. And when he takes America there, Americans need to know the truth.

They should not be fed a lot of hocus-pocus about Iraqi nukes, deadly drones that could reach the United States from Baghdad and unsubstantiated reports of a partnership between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Neither should Americans be fed with dreams about bringing democracy to the Iraqis. That wasn't a good enough - or even the real - reason for going to war in Vietnam, and it isn't good enough to go to war against Iraq.

Americans will need to be told what the real threat is to them, and they will need to be convinced that it is big enough to sacrifice the life of a single son or daughter, not to mention hundreds, possibly thousands.

Saddam Hussein's letter to the United Nations boasts of an Iraqi people who "would rather make their lives the price" of protecting his vision for Iraq. He's probably wrong about that, but it didn't stop him from sacrificing the lives of thousands of his people in two wars.

His people don't have the privilege of demanding truth. Americans do.