Nobody is Breathing Fire and Smoke

There was to us a sad sentence in the paper on Wednesday, buried deep in a huge piece about the rift in Nato.

This was the sentence: "Sympathy for the United States over the September 11th attacks has largely evaporated in a Europe troubled by the American drive to oust Saddam Hussein."

It seems an age ago, though it was only 16, 17 months, when the president and Mayor Giuliani - the hero of Ground Zero - went on the air time and again to tell us, with becks and nods and brave smiles, to go about our lives as usual.

"Erm ... Go shopping, take the kids on a picnic, go to a movie."

This, it turned out, was naive advice, at best, contradicted within days by the government's own caution - "But, be on the alert at all times, be ready for another attack."

Nobody told us how to do that and the general effect was mainly comic, like those newly-posted signs years ago on the highway running alongside La Guardia airport which said: "Caution: low-flying planes."

What caution could you take?

A friend and I playing a variation of the old "spot a beard" game used to watch cars drive by those signs and see how many people spontaneously ducked inside their cars looking like a quick scene from an old Benny Hill Show.

However, time gallops on and changes drastically.

First item on the evening news on Monday was an announcement from the government, the new homeland security department, with a personal appearance from Mr Ashcroft, the Attorney General.

It is he who has probably had the most driven, anxiety-ridden life of anyone in government, since the fatal 11th.

As boss of the FBI and every other federal officer of justice he's been in charge first of the search for the suicide bombers and then their sponsors, associates, for Guantanamo, for trying to find and identify the Arab immigrants at large in the country who outstayed their visas.

The attorney general also sets the level of risk on the new colour scale that the government has invented.

On Monday it went to orange, next to the highest.

Over last weekend the attorney general told us of imminent attacks from al-Qaeda on Americans.

So on Monday the government's recommendation - which was delivered with all the solemnity of an order - told us all, all 280 millions of us in the cities and the deserts and the mountains - north, south, east, west - to begin now to take precautions against an imminent attack by stocking the larder with four days of food and buying reams of duct tape - that thick, grey adhesive tape, stickier than Scotch tape.

For what purpose? To seal up your windows and doors against a biochemical attack.

And much of the rest of the domestic news that followed was scenes of health workers getting anthrax vaccine - but most poignantly to me, shots of young mothers in the supermarkets from Florida to Alaska, piling the carts with fruits and bread and packaged foods and bottled water, while the baby, clinging to their necks, looked on, blinking, unimpressed, blessedly unknowing.

Pictures as pathetic and sympathetic as any since those of the begrimed young nurses emerging from the inferno of 11 September.

It's the biochemical element that fuels nightmares in some people and disturbs even the most placid.

As a kind of ghostly apology to this nightmare, two nights later we watched an interview with a gentle, refined woman - the scientist in charge of Iraq's biochemical arsenal.

A more diffident, reasonable poisoner it would be difficult to imagine.

Of course, she said, she was not ashamed of her trade, she was proud for her country, to have helped devise these hideous instruments of death - but they had been disposed of.

Anyway they would never be used except as retaliation against an American attack.

But like all the other Iraqi scientists questioned, she didn't say where the poison arsenals had been stored and when they'd been destroyed, in accordance with the - 17 is it? - 17 resolutions passed by the Security Council since 1990.

That is the most exacting requirement of the pro-war case.

Now how about the anti-war case?

It began way back there with the invasion of Afghanistan.

That put the first logs on the anti-American fire. But I don't believe for long.

The voices of people who'd never heard of the Taleban or al-Qaeda were loud in protest.

America had hurled itself into Afghanistan with no motive, no real right, bombed poor women and children and left the place in chaos.

I don't think even the most rabid anti-American believes that anymore.

In a brief and brilliant campaign, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld destroyed the governing Taleban, scattered al-Qaeda agents - and incidentally while it spent a billion dollars a month fighting the war, is rebuilding a country which was close to chaos to begin with but is now getting the help of the United States Army, a thousand young American Peace Corps volunteers and medics, to build up schools and schools for women especially, medical clinics, relief centres and so on.

This effort is what President Bush has in mind for a post-war Iraq.

The manufactured picture of him as a bully, imperialist, blustering cowboy is way off the mark.

His strength - and his weakness - is that he is a Christian idealist on the Woodrow Wilson model.

He truly proposes what most of us find simply undoable - to depose tyrants and introduce democracy everywhere.

The first European fear about him when he took office was that he would retreat into the old, inter-war Republican isolationism.

Now he's accused of wanting to police the world. He believes it's America's duty, as it once was Spain's, France's, Britain's.

I must say the last quality anyone claims for George Bush is prudence. Not "ought it to be done?" but "can it possibly be done?" - and that is the heart of the anti-war case.

I'm not considering for one moment the protest marches and student placards. They're mostly simply anti-war - any war - and the bigger parades have taken all the sting out of the Iraq debate by providing a circus for every sort of dissenter to flock to - environmentalists, anti-abortionists, anti-farm lobbyists, professional pacifists and masses of the simply scared.

I do not think we have any obligation to debate anyone who is for peace at any price.

But in the past month of two thoughtful opponents - and they're very much on the rise - have been mobilising powerful arguments against the president's seeming determination to go it alone if the United Nations does not firmly and clearly specify military action - not, as now, such wheedle-word punishments as "serious consequences" or "grave developments".

The main case has lately been made by two distinguished political scientists.

1. Saddam is not irrational, he's never gone to war in the face of a deterrent threat. Once he did it against Iran because its revolutionary government tried to topple him with border raids and assassinations of high officials.

The second time was at the Gulf - a dispute about war debts and the price of oil at a time when the United States embassy appeared to say that his invasion of Kuwait was not an American concern.

2. Iraq's nuclear programme was destroyed by United Nations inspectors between 1991 and 1998 and Iraq has not rebuilt it. The evidence of using or transporting plutonium and the processes of rebuilding the project are slight. Slighter still, in spite of Herculean efforts on the part of the administration, is evidence of a link between the secular Saddam and the fundamentalist Bin Laden.

But suppose this estimate is wrong? Saddam knows that as Miss Rice, the National Security Advisor, herself puts it: "Weapons of mass destruction are unusable by Saddam because he knows that any attempt to use them would bring national obliteration."

3. As for the nightmare of biochemical weapons, he's used it only against a weak enemy that could not retaliate in kind. Saddam knows that the United States, if it chose, could retaliate in kind with overwhelming force.

4. The toppling of Saddam would cost the limping American economy between $50bn and $100bn - which it might not have. And the costs of occupying, policing and stabilising the huge country would take years, many more billions and might in fact become intolerable. As well as diverting the national energies from al-Qaeda.

Which brings them back to the main point. That Saddam is already in a closed box.

With inspectors there, his weapons work is being closely watched.

There is already a massive reserve of battle-trained American troops. Could not these be gradually reduced and replaced by a large United Nations peacekeeping force but one backed by an American reserve?

The conclusion is: "We should maintain vigilant containment" - the policy that the rest of the world regards as preferable and effective.

Saddam Hussein needs to remain in his box but we don't need a war to keep him there.

Contrary to the foreign tabloid obsession, nobody is breathing fire and smoke, nobody wants to go to war.

The very latest polls show 65% of Americans willing to go to war if the United Nations sanctions it. Only 37% if not.

But it has to be said that as the prospect darkens, no more than half the American people want to go to war at all.

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