Washington ? Dear Bonehead: Yeah, Saddam, you. I know. You expect that Oh Munificent and Mighty One stuff. You’ve had Cabinet ministers executed on television for much less. And you have had millions yes, millions gassed, subjected to torture and biological experimentation in your prisons or sacrificed on the battlefield for your ego.

But it doesn’t take a weatherman to see which way the wind is blowing, pal. No honorific salutations now. Just the truth, which some who would give you one more last chance seem to have forgotten. The noose tightens daily now.

I confess to having mixed feelings about the mother of all moral monsters becoming history. After all, we go way back. I watched you seize Iraq’s oil industry in 1972 on my first trip to a prosperous and promising Arab country you have now reduced to ruin.

I was in the room in Algiers in 1975 when you conned the shah of Iran into signing a peace treaty that you tore up four years later to launch a new war. And how about that time I sat across from you in your Baghdad palace and saw mayhem flare in your eyes when I disputed your account of how the Kurds loved your regime?

In 1987, when one of your pilots fired an Exocet missile into the USS Stark and killed 37 American seamen, I gathered enough information in Baghdad to convince me that you had ordered the attack. But the Reagan administration gave you a pass. Those guys thought you were a modernizer and a bulwark against Iran. You repaid President George H.W. Bush’s faith in you by invading Kuwait.

That fascinates me about you, S.H. You get second and third bites at the hands of people who should know better. Take Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft. In their book, “A World Transformed,” they offer a fact that is very salient for today’s debate in my country about your future. They quote the letter Bush wrote to you in January 1991, on the eve of the Gulf War, warning:

“The United States will not tolerate the use of chemical or biological weapons or the destruction of Kuwait’s oil fields and installations. The American people would demand the strongest possible response. Further, you will be held directly responsible for terrorist actions against any member of the coalition. You will pay a terrible price if you order unconscionable actions of this sort.” (Emphasis added.).

This direct threat from Bush is assumed to have kept you from ordering the use of chemical or biological weapons. But what about the clear U.S. commitment to take you out if you destroyed Kuwait’s oil fields? You did and they said OK, we’ll forget that one. You can stay in power.

You plotted an act of terrorism not against just any old member of the coalition but against Bush himself in Kuwait in 1993. For more than three years, you have been in open and material breach of the cease-fire that ended the Gulf War by refusing to permit inspections for weapons of mass destruction, with no consequences.

With that as history, I understand why you believe American leaders will always back away from confronting you. You hope Americans will forget why they should never trust your promises as well as the crimes against humanity you have committed.

But there is a new wind blowing here, Saddam. Your continuing support for terrorism was described in the present tense just last week in congressional testimony by CIA Director George Tenet, and has been documented by recent Iraqi defectors. This, plus your lust for and past use of weapons of mass destruction, have focused the collective mind of this White House since Sept. 11.

Here is what is happening, Oh Monstrous and Malignant One: The administration’s policy review on Iraq has essentially been overtaken by President George W. Bush’s decision to remove you from power. The Pentagon can now go ahead and draw up war plans very quietly for the right time, as it did in 1990. The CIA still pursues its fantasies of paying one of your bodyguards to put a bullet in your head, but Tenet’s forward-leaning testimony indicates that the agency no longer is trying to keep others from doing you in if it cannot.

And how about this: The presidents of France and Russia have in public statements in recent days softened their opposition to American action against you. That’s writing on the wall that even you should be able to read, old chum.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.