WORLD VIEW/Paul Gillespie: The nostrum that the road to Middle East peace lies through Baghdad has become conventional wisdom in the Bush administration, according to observers in Washington.
The single-minded concentration on that objective was not changed by last weekend's bombing atrocity in Bali, in which more than 180 people were killed. The attack reopened the question of al- Qaeda's responsibility and whether there are credible links between that organisation and the Saddam Hussein regime. They have yet to be convincingly established.
As a result, more and more questions were raised this week about whether the Iraq strategy deflected attention and efforts from combating terrorism - not only among US allies insisting on a United Nations mandate for any attack on Iraq, but from a growing band of critics in the United States who have up to now been mute on the question for fear of being branded anti-patriotic.
The right-wing nationalists controlling foreign policy believe that toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq would open up the prospect of a democratic revolution in the region, led by the United States. Economic development and cultural reconciliation with the West would follow.
The recently disclosed plan to occupy Iraq after defeating Saddam is part of this plan. It breaks radically with the administration's previous resistance to "nation-building" - necessarily so, because it is difficult to imagine otherwise how the break-up of Iraq would be prevented.
The plan envisages preventing the Iraqi Kurds from seceding, to appease Turkey. An audacious commitment to reform and re-educate Iraq, on the model of the US occupation of Japan and Germany after the second World War, would deal with the other potential secessionist problem - that of the Shia Muslim community in southern Iraq by destroying the Sunni-dominated state machine.
Up to 100,000 US troops would be required to put this into effect, costing an estimated $16 billion a year. Were there to be significant Iraqi resistance, these numbers and costs would escalate rapidly - raising the question of how far US public opinion would support it, not to mention European and other allies.
Taking full charge of the Iraqi oil fields would be a central aspect of the occupation. It would confer immense benefits on the US, enabling it to guarantee cheap oil, undermine the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, remove or delay the necessity to develop Russian oil reserves and head off growing demands for alternative energy sources for the foreseeable future.
Within the wider Middle East region, geopolitical engineering is envisaged to reorder the Gulf states and possibly to topple and partition Saudi Arabia. This, it is assumed, would intimidate Iran and Arab states inclined to resist such US domination. It would also intimidate Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation.
The most determined of these US nationalist hawks identify fully with the Sharon government in Israel. They say a successful military attack on Iraq would transform the Middle East and make it much easier to find a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, stopping well short of the Oslo accords and ensuring Israeli dominance of the region.
These scenarios are not pipe-dreaming or wishful thinking on the part of armchair hawks in Washington's policy think tanks. They are now becoming official policy as the build-up to war in Iraq proceeds apace.
Within the Bush administration, figures such as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Cheney and Richard Perle are directly associated with such contingency planning. The recently published strategic doctrine of pre-emptive strikes against powers threatening US hegemony underlines how serious they should be taken.
This group has worked consistently for the last decade to fashion this plan for unilateral world domination through absolute military superiority.
In a comment this week in the Washington Post, Leon Fuerth, who was National Security Adviser to the former Vice President Al Gore, warns that the plan to topple Saddam and replace him by Gen Tommy Franks, commander of the US Central Comman, with a brief to run and redesign Iraq means there "may be a dangerous intoxication with American power and a serious loss of judgment as to its limits", among the most senior persons in the US government.
He adds that if this puppet government "is supposed to win international legitimacy and to gain the loyalty of its own population, then the Bush administration's reading of human nature and of the politics of this region is very strange".
We can expect to hear more such criticism as the Iraq plans are developed and encounter growing international resistance.
A brilliant essay on the push to war by Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Foundation in the London Review of Books (October 3rd) underlines the extraordinary risks involved. The consequences of failure would be catastrophic: "A general Middle Eastern conflagration and the collapse of more pro-Western states would lose us the war against terrorism, doom untold thousands of Western civilians to death in coming decades and plunge the world economy into depression."
The dangers include the possibility that Saddam Hussein would retaliate against a US invasion with chemical and biological weapons. According to the Central Intelligence Agency director, George Tenet, this risk would move from "low" to "pretty high" if Saddam felt cornered by US military might.
This was an inconvenient estimate from the administration's point of view, published in a letter to a congressional committee. It reflects reportedly deep disquiet about the push to war strategy among the US intelligence, armed forces and the Pentagon.
Fuerth says if the strategy is pursued, the US "will be seen as having decided to establish its security on the basis of empire". Indeed, Lieven points out there are striking parallels between these plans for the Middle East and British imperial designs for the region in the 1920s.
A new hard-nosed imperialism based on military might is unrealistic and dangerous, according to many analysts. However much mobilising for it would take attention away from economic problems and be bolstered by a new kind of US nationalism, it would encounter growing opposition at home and abroad.
For Europe it poses the key question of whether to co-operate or to organise increasingly independently of a more unilateralist US superpower.