Maybe it's all just a big bluff

By MARY DEJEVSKY

The British Prime Minister's latest effort to justify a war against Iraq was as eloquent as it was brave. It was almost as ambiguous, too, with its rejection of timetables, endorsement of the UN and its familiar recitation of Saddam's crimes.

For months, Tony Blair and select ministers have tried everything - from passion through moral indignation to spurious historical parallels, not to speak of a graduate thesis snatched from the internet - to compensate for the lack of real, recent evidence. Their signal achievement has been the biggest street protest in peacetime. We are just not convinced.

Perhaps, though, convincing us is not what our Government is about. Perhaps, just perhaps, what we are watching is a quite different exercise: an elaborate bluff designed to avoid war rather than provoke it.

Let me lay my cards on the table. For eight months or so I have been an almost-lone office dissident. While sharing the widespread view that a war on Iraq is highly undesirable - and, without a UN mandate, wrong - I do not believe that anyone, not Blair, and perhaps not even the apparently triggerhappy US Administration, intends a war to happen. And the louder the war cries from Washington and London, the more I am convinced.

It takes a strong, not to say foolhardy, nerve to maintain this rejectionist front. The fancier flights of Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz warmongery out of Washington reinforce the impression that the US Administration is dead set on war. British ministers chorus their support. And the evidence, less of Saddam Hussein's crimes than of US and British war plans, piles up inexorably: all those troops, weapons and journalists arriving daily in the Gulf.

Piling on the pressure, though, is precisely what the US and Britain are doing. In this scenario, every piece of information that finds its way into the public domain is geared to one end - convincing the enemy that unless he complies with whatever is demanded, he will face massive military force. Of course, elaborate preparations must be made for war, but they are not for the purpose of fighting a war, but for the purpose of creating the credible threat of war.

The regular leaking to the media of detailed war plans fosters the impression of painstaking preparation and imminent action. Last year, the appearance of rival blueprints in the US press was evidence of splits in the military; they were a form of lobbying direct from individuals and departments in the Pentagon. The new battle plans appearing in the press are hypothetical in a different way. They are designed to show Saddam that a military operation is not only feasible, but will be 100 per cent effective in destroying his regime, unless he complies with the UN. The objective is to convince not us, but Iraq.

In the event, the political risks in this virtual war are turning out to be almost as high as those of real combat. The European Union is split over what France and Germany see as an unseemly rush to war. The dispute about missiles for Turkey may have sounded the death-knell for Nato.

Blair is in a particular bind. If he believes that the best chance of averting a war is to convince Saddam that the threat of war is real, he must put the case for war as passionately and cogently as he can. The result, however, is that Blair finds himself cast simultaneously as a warmonger and a Bush "poodle". His position at the head of his party could be at risk and the credibility of his Government has been harmed.

Senior ministers find themselves similarly trapped. Jack Straw seems to feel the contradiction more keenly than most. Last week, after delivering an especially fierce threat of war, he paused before answering yet another hostile question to say: "Hey, I'm against a war, too." Similarly, the criticism of Geoff Hoon's half-term holiday: his offence was not to have gone away, but to have cracked the facade of a Cabinet on a full war footing.

The need continually to increase the pressure on Baghdad also helps to explain the confusion in ministers' messages. Are the US and Britain planning a war because Saddam has breached UN resolutions, or because he invaded two neighbours in the past, or because he used chemical weapons against Kurds, or because he presides over a regime that uses torture and scorns human rights, or because he may be concealing weapons that we know he has?

None of these reasons, not even Iraq's failure to comply with past UN resolutions, really carries conviction. Iraq is simply not seen by the public as an immediate threat to world peace.

If the message is addressed to Saddam, however, then the grimmer the picture that is painted the better. The point is not to convince Western opinion that war is justified, but to convince Baghdad that action is likely. In that case, uncertainty is an asset. The confusion sown in British and European minds about UN mandates, timetables and whether Bush will go it alone can all be seen as designed to keep the enemy guessing.

So far it seems that US and British war propaganda has scared Western public opinion more than it has scared Saddam. There may eventually come a time, therefore, when the US and Britain have to face the very thing they were contriving to avoid - fighting a war - or back down.

Then again, they may not. All the war rhetoric from London and Washington has obscured the real concessions already made by Iraq.

The weapons inspectors are back; they have freedom of movement, including access to the presidential palaces. Iraqi scientists are being interviewed (even if they are understandably reluctant to leave their home country for that purpose).

U2 and other spy planes have the freedom of the sky over Iraq. The no-fly zones are still being enforced, and Iraq's Kurds have de facto autonomy.

More progress is needed. Baghdad must explain what happened to poison gas and other banned materials it obtained before the Gulf War. But much has been conceded. What we are looking at is a remarkably successful application of 21st-century gunboat diplomacy. There is no reason to risk failure now by actually going to war.

- INDEPENDENT