Washington ? It is accurate to say that there was little “new” in the three major speeches on Iraq given by President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the past month. Accurate, but irrelevant. Information does not have a use-by date stamped on it. Changed circumstances make the truth important even after it has ceased to be novel.

Confusing the urgent with the important is a constant risk in daily journalism and in election-year politics. On Iraq, the world has too long rushed past the obvious. As Bush and Blair spotlight and lengthen the list of the dark deeds already committed and now planned by the Baathist regime in Baghdad, there is no intellectually honest way to continue saying, “We didn’t know.” Or to ask, “What’s that got to do with us?”

As any top-secret CIA analyst or semicompetent therapist will tell you, knowledge is important not when it first becomes available, but when an audience becomes available to absorb and act on the knowledge. Two American presidents in the past decade sank into denial rather than deal with Iraq decisively. Sept. 11, 2001, removed that psychological luxury for George W. Bush and for the public.

Bush’s immediate predecessors overlooked the genocide against the Kurds, defiance of the United Nations on weapons of mass destruction, the harboring of terrorists, the breaking of the overly generous cease-fire terms that the United States dictated at the end of the Gulf War and other parts of what Bush on Monday accurately called Iraq’s “unique” record of evil. Until the Sept. 11 attacks, Bush and his Cabinet seemed able to also argue information about Iraq.

Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, publicly dismissed information published in this column early last year about the increasing tempo of Iraq’s firing on American and British pilots over no-fly zones. Monday night the president cited the hostile fire in his case against Iraq.

A sea change has occurred in official Washington since the president decided last summer that he would soon have to be ready to go to war against Iraq. Public attempts by officials to bury or explain away menacing information about Iraq have dried up or gone underground. Now information is marshaled to make the case, rather than deflect it.

This is, broadly speaking, political use of information no more and no less so than was the previous phase of denial and obfuscation. Bush mobilized facts on Monday to mobilize the nation for a challenge that is no less dangerous for being “largely familiar,” as The New York Times labeled Bush’s arguments in Tuesday editions.

The State Department and CIA, institutionally wary and dismissive of the extensive intelligence about Saddam Hussein and his crimes provided by the dissidents of the Iraqi National Congress, had to listen Monday night to the president recite a dossier full of INC information and insights that have filtered down over the years through the media, the government and academia to the skillful and alert speechwriters on Bush’s staff.

When Bush correctly labeled the man all Arabs know as Saddam as “a student of Stalin, using murder as a tool of terror and control within his own Cabinet, within his own army and even within his own family,” he was drawing on the expert analysis of Ahmed Chalabi, Kanan Makiya and other Iraqis who for several decades have told Westerners tales of seemingly unbelievable horrors tales that time after time proved to have been understatements.

The government is not the only American institution to have observed Iraq through a glass fitfully for a decade and more.

“You sure write a lot about Iraq,” an exasperated editor at The Washington Post said to me in 1998. I took it as an unintended compliment from a colleague who was not eager to devote more space to Saddam’s transgressions then. Bush’s determination has cleared news space as well as time at the Pentagon for Iraq.

The information battlefield is the crucial first stage of war in the electronic era. That was true in Kosovo and in Bosnia. It is even more true since the al-Qaida attacks on the United States illuminated in a blinding burst of light the failure of oceans, of deterrence and of the misplaced hopes that letting sleeping monsters lie would protect Americans from terror.

The information about Saddam’s Iraq that Bush and Blair have assembled and presented to their nations may not be all that “new.” But the knowledge they have drawn from it is fresh and, as they say, urgent.

Jim Hoagland is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.