By Nick Assinder BBC News Online political correspondent

Tony Blair's visit to see his closest ally George Bush was always going to be branded a war summit.

So it's a pretty fair bet that, at some point during the Camp David meeting, there will be headlines declaring "It's war", or something similar.

And those claims will be just about right.

Few doubt that the primary aim of this meeting will be for the two men to put the final touches to their strategy to finish off Saddam Hussein once and for all.

Time has run out for Saddam

They will discuss how to persuade the UN to pass a second resolution legitimising war - or whether such a resolution is even necessary.

They will agree the need to step up the diplomatic campaign to win over the rest of the world to war.

And they will look at ways of shifting sceptical public opinion in both their countries.

Disarm Saddam

What they most certainly will not do is agree that they should give Saddam Hussein another chance to do the decent thing.

The prime minister is under immense pressure to act as a restraining influence on the president, but he now has the explicit backing of European leaders - with the notable exceptions of France and Germany - to disarm Saddam by force.

That has signalled a potentially serious split inside Europe over the war, a crisis which Mr Blair was particularly eager to avoid.

But all that is unlikely to mean any lengthy delay in action.

The only delay now will be to allow time for the leaders to win over the UN or, alternatively, prepare their case for going it alone.

Calls by the inspectors to be given months to continue their work are unlikely to be met.

Material breach

Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix will make a fresh report to the UN on 14 February and this is another Valentines Day which looks set to go down in history.

Blair wants to avert Euro split

In the days leading up to the summit, all the rhetoric stoked up the war atmosphere with both the president and the prime minister declaring Iraq was now in clear material breach of the UN resolution.

Iraq's dossier detailing Saddam's weapons programme has already been branded a lie - breaching one part of resolution 1441.

And the report by chief weapons inspector Hans Blix has, they claim, proved that Saddam has now breached the second vital part of the resolution, by refusing to cooperate with the inspectors.

If there was still any doubt over the two leader's intentions, it was pretty much dispelled by the president's state of the union address and Tony Blair's pre-summit pronouncements.

Slapped down

Most significantly, they claimed more plainly than ever before that Saddam is harbouring al-Qaeda terrorists - with the clear implication that he must be supporting them and possibly even furnishing them with weapons of mass destruction.

President Bush was explicit about this but Tony Blair would not say it as bluntly as that in public, presumably because such suggestions have been slapped down in the past. But his spokesmen pulled few punches.

He insisted that Saddam was "sheltering" al-Qaeda operatives.

It may be propaganda but it is clearly hoped it will filter through to the general public.

Public opinion has remained resolutely opposed to war and there has been little sign that the prime minister has won over his own backbench doubters.

So we can expect the campaign to intensify over the next few days, but all the talk will pointing in one direction - towards war.