America rattles Saddam's cage hoping he will lash out in anger

The Bush administration appears to be trying to prove that a war can be won by sabre-rattling alone. Amid an almost deafening public indifference, hardly a day goes by without a new report or disclosure suggesting that a US attack, at the end of this year or early next, is a virtual certainty.

The official position was set out by President George Bush at his press conference on Monday. He said America was committed to "regime change" in Baghdad and would use "all the tools at our disposal" to achieve that end. But he insisted again that he had not made a final decision on any plan. He dismissed the leak of detailed Pentagon war plans to The New York Times last week as "somebody down there at level five flexing some 'know-how' muscle".

This week the leaks have continued, first in a report claiming that the US would use Jordanian airfields to launch its assault ­ even though the Jordanians have not been informed of the plan, and every indication is that they would not give permission if asked. Then came another and somewhat contradictory report in USA Today, to the effect that the military planners had "raised the bar" for an invasion. It would now require a serious provocation by Saddam Hussein, such as invading a neighbour or attacking the Kurds or Shia Muslims in the south, before the US war machine started to roll. Like the other reports, it was sourced to anonymous "officials".

The implication of the New York Times revelations is that the "Afghan model" for an invasion of Iraq, involving bombing, special forces and covert CIA operations, with the help of an internal insurrection (for the opposition Northern Alliance read the Kurds), had been dropped. Instead the blueprint, entitled Cent-Com Course for Action, puts the emphasis on an all-out assault involving 250,000 or 300,000 US troops, and a massive air attack aimed at crucial infrastructure targets as well as suspected sites where weapons of mass destruction are being developed or stored.

Some analysts believe the source of the leak to be military commanders who believe the politicians are blithely talking up an operation whose potential cost in casualties for US forces they do not fully appreciate. But others take the report as part of a process of softening up President Saddam, forcing him into a rash move that would give Washington the pretext it required. Talk of US and British agents stirring up trouble among the Kurds might, for example, prod the Iraqi leader into a strike against them, thus offering the US justification to step in.

This strategy would also explain why Washington is so averse to protracted negotiations over the return of United Nations weapons inspectors, and was delighted by the failure of the latest round of talks last week in Geneva. Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary and a leading proponent of action to get rid of President Saddam, has derided the inspection process. They would be unable to inspect anything worth inspecting, he insists, while the talks would enable President Saddam to play for time, throwing open his doors to stave off an invasion.

Instead, Washington is starting to focus on a possible provocation that would clear any conceivable bar: links between Iraq and al-Qa'ida pointing to Baghdad having had a hand in terrorist attacks, or even 11 September itself. After the attacks, the CIA and the Pentagon seemed if anything to play down reports that Mohamed Atta, the hijackers' ringleader, met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague earlier in 2001. But officials are now looking at that episode again, while an Iraqi defector claimed in a television documentary this week that he had seen Osama bin Laden in Baghdad in July 1998, just before al-Qa'ida attacked two US embassies in east Africa.

Either story, if confirmed, would vindicate Washington's argument for toppling President Saddam ­ that while he might not use chemical, nuclear or biological weapons, he would make them available to terrorists. If the US could prove a connection between Iraq and al-Qa'ida, doubts over whether an invasion was justified would disappear. In the meantime, the sabre-rattling continues.