Bush wages two-fronted campaign for Iraqi war

The process began on Friday morning, with one of those pieces of personal diplomacy whose practical execution defies the imagination. In the space of 30 minutes, according to the White House, President George Bush spoke to Presidents Jacques Chirac of France, Jiang Zemin of China and Vladimir Putin of Russia, to discuss the crisis over Iraq.

Now Mr Bush, to use his own phrase, is not a "multinational kind of guy", so one presumes interpreters were employed, meaning that the actual exchanges may have lasted no more than five minutes apiece. Their exact contents have not been vouchsafed to the rest of us, but given the time restraints, they are unlikely to have been especially profound.

Certainly, they do not appear to have greatly modified the objections of these three permanent United Nations Security Council members, each with the right of veto, to the pre-emptive strike favoured by the US President to get rid of Saddam Hussein.

But in almost pro-forma fashion, the conversations set in motion a chain of events which may lead to the US unleashing a military campaign against Iraq next January or February – the very same months 12 years ago in which Mr Bush's father conducted Operation Desert Storm to drive President Saddam from Kuwait, at exactly the same halfway point in his own Presidential term.

Step two came yesterday as Mr Bush completed his first round of contacts with the other members of the "Big Five" UN powers by conferring (this time unencumbered by interpreters) at Camp David with our own Tony Blair – along with Israel's Ariel Sharon, the only other unconditional believer in Mission Get-Saddam among America's close allies. On Thursday, the President will carry out step three when he takes the rostrum at the UN General Assembly to set out the case against the Iraqi dictator to the world.

Thereafter, for the following three or four months, Washington will expand the offensive of persuasion ahead of the real offensive against Saddam. The war of words is being fought on two fronts, both abroad and at home. The two are closely linked, indeed they are mutually reinforcing.

Recent polls in the US show that the greater the international support for war against President Saddam, the readier Americans will be to go to war against Iraq, whatever the cost in blood and treasure. And the greater the backing for Mr Bush by his own public, the harder it will be for the outside world, whatever its misgivings, not to go along.

At home, too, Mr Bush has been busy since returning here from a month's holiday in Texas, inviting key lawmakers to the White House and sending his top advisers up to Capitol Hill to explain why Congress should pass a resolution authorising the President to go to war – even though his lawyers tell him that authority exists, already thanks to the Iraqi leader's flouting of the disarmament terms which ended the 1991 Gulf War.

The assumption is that Mr Bush will get the Congressional blessing he seeks, provided he can produce more evidence that Iraq continues its build-up of chemical and biological weapons, and is closing in on nuclear weapons as well. The international sell, however, may be rather harder.

In his 12 September speech, Mr Bush is likely to ask for a Security Council resolution giving Iraq a deadline to accept the return of UN weapons inspectors for the first time since 1998 on an unfettered, go-anywhere basis ... or else. Whether he gets one will probably depend on the "or else".

An explicit threat of military action would surely draw a Russian or a Chinese veto. An implicit threat might be enough to persuade Peking or Moscow to abstain, but the calendar is very tight.

With an "October surprise" of a snap early attack apparently ruled out by both logistics and international opinion, Mr Bush will want a Security Council vote within a few weeks. This would give the UN time to get its inspection teams ready to go and force an Iraqi yes or no by late winter at the latest – before the desert warfare season ends with the onset of hot weather. The effective window is likely to be the same as it was for his father 12 years earlier.

But what will Washington do if it fails to secure any Security Council resolution, or gets a resolution so weak that President Saddam can play his usual time-wasting games? At the very least, Mr Bush will be able to say he's given the UN route his best shot.

The bottom line, however, is that while he recognises the need for UN backing, Mr Bush will not give the world body a veto on his new doctrine of pre-emptive defence. The issue with Iraq, he says "is not inspectors, it's disarmament". And unless the Iraqi leader folds, the increasingly probable outcome is war.