Mary Dejevsky: Are the American hawks pulling back from war?

We have grown so used to war talk from Washington that we are incapable of detecting a new theme

Here is your pre-Christmas quiz starter for ... war. Who said these words in the days before Baghdad handed over its 12,000-page weapons report to the United Nations inspectors?

"I'm quite sure President Bush is not going to make a decision [to go to war] on the basis of one single piece of information ... He's going to make it not only on the pattern of information but also close consultation, particularly with our allies, but indeed with the international community."

Was it (1) Colin Powell, the solo-flying dove in the US Administration; (2) the British prime minister, Tony Blair, who seems to have been borne along in the US President's slipstream for as long as war with Iraq has been an option, or (3) Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary and the most hawkish of the Pentagon's many hawks?

Depending on your feelings about going to war with Iraq, you may be disappointed or relieved to hear that the answer is (3): Mr Wolfowitz. And you may be no less disappointed or relieved to learn that he voiced similarly cautious sentiments not on one isolated, perhaps jet-lagged, occasion, but at practically every stop of his recent trip to Europe.

If you wanted to be cynical about it, you might accuse Mr Wolfowitz of telling war-averse Europeans what they wanted to hear. But the Pentagon's blunt-speaking second in command is not a man who tailors his words to his audience. Anyway, his recent message to the American public sounds remarkably similar and boils down to this: there will be no snap decisions; disarmament, not war, is the desired end, and we must keep the alliance together.

There are probably only two people in the whole US administration from whom Mr Wolfowitz would take a cue. One would be his Pentagon boss, chief hawk Donald Rumsfeld; the other – the President himself. Which is why the recent change in his vocabulary and tone deserve to be noticed.

Despite this shift, we woke up yet again yesterday to news headlines that forecast imminent war with Iraq. "US action looms larger"; "US forces ready to strike Iraq 'in weeks' "; "Defiant Iraq on collision course", to cite but a few. After a brief lull, as the UN inspectors prepared for their mission, we are also back in the landscape of detailed (but hypothetical) war scenarios.

Perhaps we have grown so used to hearing unbridled war talk from Washington that we are now incapable of detecting a new theme as it emerges from its belligerent accompaniment. For months, the US Administration has evinced a deep split between those advocating a war on Iraq and those who view war as a last, highly undesirable resort. Until the summer, the warriors seemed dominant. Now, the Colin Powell tendency is not only in the ascendant, but appears to have won over the President. But the message is not getting through to the rest of the world.

The threat of war has receded in three distinct steps. It was at its height on the eve of the UN General Assembly in September, when Mr Bush looked ready to wage war on Iraq with no allies but Britain. Tony Blair's intervention may or may not have tempered Mr Bush's intentions, but when the US President gave his address on the day after the 11 September anniversary, he had dropped the language of good and evil that had marked his foreign policy discourse hitherto, and agreed to work through the United Nations.

The threat receded further when Mr Bush's Republican Party won the mid-term Congressional elections on 5 November. The Administration's hard line on Iraq, as an extension of the "war on terror", was a popular campaign pitch, especially in the heartland. Mr Bush could not afford to moderate either the rhetoric or the policy before the poll. The period between the mid-terms and the next Presidential campaign afford a US President a rare interlude of relative freedom from domestic and party political pressures.

The third move away from war came with the US decision, shortly after the elections, to agree to the diluted Security Council resolution that facilitated the resumption of UN inspections. The talks, sometimes heated, on the small print of the resolution offered the US a chance to go back on its decision to proceed multilaterally. In the end, Washington gave more ground than anyone else to secure a unanimous resolution.

For all the warlike noises off – now led not by any Cabinet members, but by Pentagon "adviser" Richard Perle – the US Administration seems further from approving a war on Iraq now than it has ever been. The realistic threat of force, of course, has to be maintained – that is why Baghdad finally allowed the UN inspectors back. But the emphasis from Washington is now on keeping the UN-forged alliance together. And key elements of its rhetoric have changed. You would be hard put to it to find any reference to "regime change" in any official utterance of recent weeks. Officials now talk of changing the behaviour of the regime instead. Disarmament is the chief objective, to be accomplished "peacefully, if possible; by force, if necessary". War is now only "the last option".

Most tellingly, the "hawks" have begun to complain that Mr Bush is not preparing his fellow-countrymen sufficiently for war. Perhaps that is because he is preparing them for peace instead.

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk