WASHINGTON - Now that Secretary of State Colin Powell has declared Iraq to be in "material breach" of the U.N. Security Council's requirement for full disclosure of its program of weapons of mass destruction, the White House says "the final stage" has begun in the U.S. buildup for war.

But Mr. Powell at the same time says the work of the U.N. weapons inspectors will continue, with a focus on interviewing Iraqi scientists and with the United States finally providing intelligence it has to confirm that Iraq is lying in saying it no longer has such weapons programs. So Saddam Hussein's failure to come clean on what he has, once touted by the Bush administration as the trigger for an attack on Iraq, is now only one more step toward that consequence.

It's clear from this that the administration once again has been cooled off by the insistence of other Security Council members, most notably Russia, that the inspections process be allowed to run its full if agonizingly slow course. So much for President Bush's earlier declaration that "we will not tolerate any deception, denial or deceit. Period."

Mr. Bush's insistence on ousting or eliminating Mr. Hussein, euphemistically softened to "regime change," also over time has been de-personalized and downgraded to getting rid of his worst weapons. "It is still up to Iraq," Mr. Powell said the other day, "to determine how its disarmament will happen."

With the Jan. 27 deadline set by the U.N. resolution for the inspectors' report on Iraqi compliance, it's now generally assumed that no attack, either by a U.N. force or unilaterally by the United States, will take place before that date at the earliest. The hawks in the administration, such as the Pentagon's Paul Wolfowitz and adviser Richard Perle, must be pulling their hair out.

The administration, at the same time, continues to operate on the curious premise that the burden of proof that Mr. Hussein has no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or program to make them is on him, not really on the inspectors. Hans Blix, the chief of the U.N. team, acknowledges that his group can't hope to find every possible weapons-making facility in such a big country.

Up to now, for all the talk, the Bush administration has not convinced many other U.N. members that suspicions of an Iraqi WMD program are valid or verifiable. Russia's U.N. ambassador, Sergey Lavrov, referring to the repeated American allegation, said the other day: "We have heard it many times. We never saw any evidence that this is the case. We don't know whether this is true or not, and we want this to be verified" by the U.N.-authorized inspectors.

More important at home, many Americans are unconvinced. Accordingly, the time has come for the United States to stop saying it has evidence of Iraq's duplicity in the matter and to produce it publicly, not simply say it will make such evidence available to the inspection team.

It likely will be argued that public disclosure of whatever evidence the administration has of Iraqi weapons development and/or production would compromise U.S. intelligence agents, jeopardizing the American spy network and agents' lives.

But the families of the more than 100,000 American troops apparently to be thrown into an attack on Iraq will want to know that their lives are being put on the line based not on suspicions but on hard facts of a weapons threat now or in the foreseeable future.

In the imperative of convincing the American people of the necessity of going to war against Iraq, I'm reminded of the now-famous line from the movie Jerry Maguire, in which Tom Cruise plays a struggling agent for a sports star: "Show me the money." In this case, it needs to be: Show us the proof.

Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.