President Bush II has Never Been Busier

As the gentlemen of the cloth say - or used to say - I take my text this morning (or evening as the case may be) from the very irreverend Francis Bacon - not the painter but the philosopher, scientist, statesman, lord chancellor, 1561 to 1626.

He's here looking over the necessary elements of any nation's ability to conduct a successful war and the weapons available which - may I remind any beardless youths in the class - did not include Scud missiles.

Well how about chemical or biological warfare? Well yes, as a fact.

The people fighting in besieged cities in Bacon's day and well before dreaded, more than battering rams or elementary firebombs, the tossing of diseased corpses over the fortified city walls.

Well here is the passage:

"Armouries, stored arsenals, walled towns, goodly races of horse, chariots of war, elephants, ordnance, artillery and the like - all this is but a sheep in a lion's skin unless the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike.

"Nay, numbers in armies matter little where the people is of weak courage. For, as Virgil says, it never troubles a wolf how many the sheep be."

As with all good preachers, including John Donne and my father, I shall let the text sink in and maybe at the end it will have all the more point and pungency.

Congress is back after its, I must say, fretful August break.

And the president is back at the White House, after his month at his ranch.

I think I ought to put in here a note which is suggested by several pieces I've come across in the European press - despatches from their Washington correspondents, which strike a note of wonder and incomprehension that while Europe burns with fear about the administration's threats to Iraq, the President of the United States plays cowboy in Texas or is busy foolishly showing off his pectoral muscles by felling logs.

As bad, somebody thought, as Eisenhower playing golf while the Cold War froze over.

Let me say at once that President Bush II has never been busier in his presidential life than in the past month.

Whether the president is on a range or fishing or playing golf no further from him than a few feet or 10 seconds is the anonymous man who carries the nuclear code for the day - just in case.

Wherever the president and whenever the president goes to the bathroom a secret service man sits just outside the door.

So President Bush has returned from his country jail to his elegant townhouse jail.

And at any normal time, any time that is before last September the 11th, he would be now consulting the Senate and House leaders of both parties about upcoming proposed legislation.

And they would have started this time by taking up the very pressing desire of the Democrats to get free prescription medicines for everybody, as distinct from merely the old and the very poor; and the Republicans' impatient desire to see what relationship the president and the CIA and the FBI can have, must have, in the structure of the new, huge government department which is called Homeland Security.

Well, they brought up neither.

No sooner had the senators returned from the grassroots than a delegation, you might say, wanted to meet the president as soon as possible, and quite bluntly ask him to make the case for military action, meaning a pre-emptive strike against Iraq.

As you know he met them on Wednesday and promised to make the case next week.

However, about Iraq there are not one but two hassles or debates brewing.

The first has to do with whether the president on his own has a constitutional right to make war.

The Constitution doesn't say no but it doesn't say yes and the fact is that the last time Congress formally declared war was against Italy in December 1941 after Pearl Harbour and after the United States had declared war on Germany.

Of course in the following 61 years there have been quite a few acts of war taken on the responsibility of presidents from Truman to Clinton.

But this time it's time, as one senator put it, to revisit the Constitution.

I doubt you'll have to wait long for that debate to resolve itself or even to take place.

Almost 60 years of presidential ignoring of this clause will surely be outweighed by the heavier more urgent question of: Does the president intend, on his own authority, to take military action against Iraq?

What is new is pre-emptive action, not retaliation.

The president himself grew tired while in Texas of constantly pretending that this was a frenzy created by the media and that he himself had no martial plans, just yet.

But the media responded "Well you started it" - which he didn't quite, as I reported for a month or more, the whole hullabaloo started when somebody leaked the Iraq contingency plan, or what we call in the jargon "the worst possible scenario".

Then what we were bound to deduce correctly was that the president and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld and several intimates had really been scrutinising that scenario and with new evidence were more and more convinced that the time to act might be very soon.

At that point the Secretary of State - General Powell - spoke up, surely with the president's permission.

He begged to give Saddam Hussein one more chance to turn down and/or violate a United Nations inspection team.

At the same time Vice-President Cheney - who'd not been heard from - Mr Cheney, surely with the president's knowledge, made a grave and deadly earnest speech in favour of early action against Iraq and remarked - in italics, so to speak - that another try with the UN could offer only false comfort.

Within days the administration stand received a stunning gesture of defiance from Mr Putin, who was reported to be about to sign a $40bn trade deal with Saddam.

Since then the Russian foreign minister has denied it.

Then it seems everybody in or out of power leapt into the act - generals, including General Schwarzkopf, the commander of the Gulf War, said the cost of going into Iraq would be incalculable both in lives, in money and in confusion across Arabia.

Mr Nelson Mandela came out of retirement to say that an attack on Iraq would produce chaos in the Arab world and nullify or weaken the war on terrorism.

And then the German chancellor came out, the morning after Mr Bush's promise to lay his case before the United Nations, to say more firmly than ever that Germany will not join any nation that attacks Iraq - and hinted that even a Security Council resolution in favour would not guarantee German support.

These separate, defiant cries were heard against a chorus of European leaders chanting "no war".

Before the president's decision to state his case first to top congressional leaders and then next week to the United Nations, I thought the president was playing the old game, at which Franklin Roosevelt was the master, of floating a risky policy through another cabinet officer's voice, what was always known as a trial balloon.

And then if the public shoots it down the president can say, as Mr Roosevelt so often blithely said, "Well, Secretary Knox has a perfect right to his own opinion" - and he would blow a cheerful smoke ring.

But two trial balloons - Secretary Powell in one direction, the vice-president in another? Weird and unlikely.

The most likely, and I'm afraid the most fearsome possibility, is that Secretary Rumsfeld - who's been deeper into this than anybody - Mr Rumsfeld, and therefore the president, know something we don't know, nor does the cabinet, nor the European leaders, nor Mr Mandela, nor the generals - nobody, except one friend - Prime Minister Blair.

His speech the other night had the same gravity and anxiety as the vice-president's.

Which brings in the very necessary evidence of the polls. How does the public feel?

The polls have been scant but on Thursday we read that whereas a month ago the national support for a war on Iraq was 69%, this week it dropped to 56%.

But when the crucial question was put: Would you willingly go to war alone with no promised allies? - the support drops way down to 39%.

Whatever President Bush decides to do, that could be the gravest news of all.

The American generation that would have to fight this war has known no war, known nothing but good times and ease and unprecedented prosperity for 30 years.

Which brings us back to Francis Bacon writing 400 years ago.

"Stored arsenals and armouries, walled towns, goodly races of horse, chariots of war, elephants, ordnance, artillery and the like - all this is but a sheep in a lion's skin unless the breed and disposition of the people be stout and warlike.

"Nay, numbers in armies matter little where the people is of weak courage."

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