What Mr Bush has in mind is nothing less than a reshaping of the world

If Bush wins in Iraq with 'acceptable' casualties, we will enter a more dangerous period than any in the last half century

What a pleasure to hear someone actually opting for the plain truth. One morning last week I heard a New York Times correspondent being asked on the radio if he believed war could be averted with Saddam Hussein in power. No, he said. The substance of the journalist's position was that George Bush would not go into the next election with Saddam shouting abuse from Baghdad. One can just visualise the Democrats' TV ads. They flash up a picture of Osama bin Laden and the commentary says: "George Bush promised to bring him in dead or alive." And then a picture of Saddam: "He promised to bring him in." And then a picture of George W: "Where are they George?"

It is a prospect to chill the heart of the toughest campaigner. Mr Bush knows he will have little good news on the economic front to woo the electorate. There is muttering aplenty in the heartland about how he is the rich son of a rich father who cares too much for rich folks. If the President can't tell Americans that he's made their world (as distinct from "the world") a safer place, he has nothing at all to offer.

The op-ed pages of US newspapers have been full of sceptical pieces about Bush and the looming war. Here's Frank Rich writing in The New York Times on Pearl Harbor Day, last 7 December: "History will eventually tell us whether Pearl Harbor Day 2002 is the gateway to a war as necessary as the Second World War, or to a tragedy of unintended consequences redolent of the First World War. A savage dictator is delivering a 'full' accounting of his weapons arsenal that only a fool would take for fact, and a President of the US is pretending (not very hard) to indulge this UN rigmarole while he calls up more reserves for the confrontation he seeks."

Yet many in media and political Britain have failed to grasp this reality. Transfixed by the machinery of diplomacy, they have not understood the opposite ambitions of Saddam Hussein and his nemesis in waiting, George Bush.

Over the past year numerous journalistic colleagues have told me Bush didn't want to go to war, or that wiser counsel in Washington would prevent the inexorable move towards conflict we are now witnessing. Get real, my friends. If Saddam isn't on a plane to somewhere sunny soon, then war is inevitable.

I have been warned against writing a piece that howls "I told you so"; but allow me just the smallest bit of space to restate what I've been saying for 18 months. The game has always been to get rid of Saddam. Regime change has never meant containing the threat of Saddam or changing his behaviour. As Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, put it: "Saddam disarming is the mother of all hypotheticals."

Bush knew that he could depend on Saddam screwing up the inspections and delivering a plausible justification to oust him. While we can argue all day and night about the motives for ousting Saddam, don't ever doubt the goal.

Even if Tony Blair believed that disarmament is the goal, President Bush has never had any doubts. When the White House talks of ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, it means overthrowing Saddam or forcing him into exile.

We haven't been told the truth by Washington because the White House believes, in the immortal words of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, we "can't handle the truth". According to this world view, hard men must make ruthless choices so that we can sleep easily in our beds. The choices made and the actions that flow from them will be justified in the lofty rhetoric of human rights. Get ready for a new generation of heart-wrenching images. Now Iraq's torture victims are poster of the month, then it will be the inmates of North Korea's gulags. But you can rest easy if you are a friend like General Dostum, the murderous warlord in Afghanistan – we won't embarrass you with denunciations from the White House or disagreeable prosecutions or investigations.

According to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strike, Saddam is a potential threat and is weak enough to be attacked. North Korea, on the other hand, is also a threat but is not yet weak enough to be attacked. The US may adopt different strategies, but it has determined that the political system in North Korea is itself a weapon of mass destruction. The dear leader in Pyongyang is also being sized up for the long drop. What Mr Bush has in mind is nothing less than a reshaping of the world. He wishes to turn it into a place without enemies. Part of his strategy will be to use military as well as economic power. If he wins in Iraq with an "acceptable" level of death and destruction, the President will be emboldened and we will enter what is potentially a more dangerous period than any in the last half century. Dangerous because military success too often invites hubris and is never an automatic guarantor of a stable political order.

In the aftermath of 11 September, America showed admirable restraint. It did not lash out but worked to identify its targets and sought international support for action. It has had unprecedented co-operation from the rest of the international community in its pursuit of al-Qa'ida. People can see a clear danger and need little persuading that tough measures are needed.

But on Iraq, the world knows it is has been told too little, and often too late. Set aside the reflexive anti-Americanists, who howl at every foreign policy move Washington makes, and analyse what has happened to the so called middle-ground. These are the people who supported the interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan and East Timor; they did so because they were convinced of a moral case. They also broadly supported America's right to pursue Bin Laden and his operatives and to overthrow the Taliban. When these people feel they haven't been given the full story, then the proponents of war have a potentially serious problem. Yet that swath of public opinion that opposes or is sceptical about war hasn't yet actively pressed the politicians. The sceptical have decided to wait and see. They will not rise up at the start of war, but will watch how it unfolds.

They will wait to see if the invading armies discover secret stocks of banned weapons. Stand by for pictures of secret underground chambers stocked with nerve gas and other delights. These will be used to provide retrospective justification for military action. But the war leaders must hope that conflict will be swift and the civilian and military casualties light. They must pray that the dominant image is of Iraqis dancing in the street at Saddam's overthrow, and not Baghdad as Sarajevo or, worse still, Stalingrad. And even if it all seems to take place without too much bloodshed, we will still not know how the guns of March will be heard across the globe. Who will they frighten into submission and who will they inspire to hatred of America and its friends? Not just for Bush and Blair or Saddam, but for all of us, the stakes are unimaginably high.

The writer is a BBC Special Correspondent