The 'evidence' that the Al-Qaeda terrorist network has connections with Saddam Hussein has diminished, writes Elaine Lafferty in New York. US targeting of Iraq appears to have more to do with American domestic considerations than anything else
The fog of war, in addition to obscuring body counts in the mountains of Afghanistan, is comfortably settling in over US policymakers. There is, to be sure, a "what's next, who's next?" feel to discussions of America's ongoing war against terrorism. But context itself is emerging; after toppling the Taliban, after routing Al-Qaeda from its caves, what are the military and policy objectives the US is pursuing? Where are we going, when are we going there, and what do we do when we get there? Is all this about September 11th, or is it about something else? President Bush's most immediate priority seems to be getting cash.
As Congress prepares to vote on next year's budget, Mr Bush is hitting the road to promote his plan for big Pentagon spending increases. He left the White House yesterday morning for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to rally military men and women behind his call to raise defence spending by $48 billion to $379 billion, the largest increase in two decades.
Mr Bush has proposed using the money to give service personnel pay raises, acquire more high-tech precision weapons and build missile defences. His visit to the commando forces, which are largely credited with US success against terrorist targets in Afghanistan, comes days before Republicans try to push their $2.1 trillion election-year budget through the full House.
The spending blueprint for the fiscal year beginning October 1st, which gives Mr Bush nearly everything he wanted for the Pentagon, passed the House Budget Committee on a mostly party-line vote of 23 to 18.
While Mr Bush is busy relieving the US of its budget surplus, Vice-President Dick Cheney is trying to sell an invasion of Iraq to the rest of the world on a 10-day foreign trip. Suffice to say Mr Cheney got the short end of the assignment stick; Europe and Iraq's neighbours in the Middle East are extremely reluctant customers for this new war product, which looks a lot like its 1991 predecessor. Combine the reluctance of the rest of the world to be plunged into a major war with a general befuddlement as to the US new policy on nuclear weapons - which might be summed up as "sure we can use 'em if we want to" - and you have a sense of the difficulties facing Mr Cheney.
The US's best chance of selling an invasion of Iraq to both the Europeans and the American public was to link Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks and to Osama bin Laden.
For awhile that looked easy enough. It became accepted wisdom that Al Qaeda operative Mohammed Atta, a pilot and organiser of the World Trade Centre attack, had in April 2000 met an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague named Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani.
New York Times columnist William Safire wrote that the alleged Atta-al Ani meeting was "the undisputed fact connecting Iraq's Saddam Hussein to the September 11th attacks." Former CIA director James Woolsey also referred to the Prague meeting in a piece in the Wall Street Journal last October headlined "The Iraq Connection".
But the connection between the September 11th attacks and Iraq has recently grown more nebulous, as has the evidence that Mr Atta actually held such a meeting. Even the CIA is now sceptical.
According to David Ignatious at the Washington Post, there are intelligence reports that actually indicate Saddam Hussein personally decided against allowing bin Laden and Al Qaeda to use Iraq as a base because he feared they might destabilise his regime. And the time and place of the meeting between Mr Atta and the Iraqi operative have also become more confused.
The Czech Interior Minister, Stanislav Gross, said in October that the two had met in April 2001. Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman told CNN in November: "Atta contacted some Iraqi agent, not to prepare the terrorist attack on [the twin towers] but to prepare [a] terrorist attack on just the building of Radio Free Europe" in Prague. In December,Czech President Vaclav Havel said there was only "a 70 per cent" chance Atta met al-Ani.
So the notion that an attack on Iraq is part of the war against terrorism is fading. The Bush administration has wisely realised that it is unlikely that it will be able to prove that Iraq was part of bin Laden's operation.
Instead, the expanding war on terrorism is being more narrowly focused. In the Philippines, some 160 Special Operations Forces and 600 support troops are coaching 6,000 locals as they try to oust Abu Sayyaf, an Islamic terrorist group with loose links to Al Qaeda, but with definite links to the kidnapping and continued holding of an American missionary couple.
In Yemen, the Pentagon is sending 100 Special Operations soldiers and an undisclosed number of troops to assist Yemeni forces in routing Al-Qaeda from the border areas with Saudi Arabia.
In Georgia, the US is deploying 100-200 military advisers to train some locals in finding about a dozen Chechen rebels with Al-Qaeda links. And of course, the military operation in Afghanistan is far from finished.
So does this mean Iraq is now off the radar? To the contrary. The Bush administration has switched gears, and is now actively advocating an invasion of Iraq based not on its role in a world-wide terrorist network, but simply because Saddam Hussein remains what he has been for much of two decades; a risk-taking dictator who has access to biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction and who is eager to obtain nuclear weapons, if he hasn't already.
In November, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said: "The world would clearly be better off and the Iraqi people would be better off if Saddam Hussein were not in power." Officially, Mr Bush began the switch in January with the "axis of evil" speech, a speech meant to be reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's campaign against the "Evil Empire" of the Soviet Union, and an attempt to cast Iraq as a villain quite apart from September 11th.
Why now? The Bush administration and its advocates argue that US foreign policy on Iraq has now come to the end of its tether. Containment, in place since 1991, they say, has started to unravel. There are no UN inspections of Iraq's arsenal. More and more countries are ignoring sanctions against Iraq; the Chinese were recently found to be building a nationwide fibre optics communications system similar to those destroyed by US airstrikes in January 2001.
Bolstering sanctions and compelling compliance would require action by the UN Security Council and that, advocates rightly note, is not going to happen.
Deterrence is another archaic notion, the hawks argue. They concede that the threat of annihilation from the US has worked against Saddam Hussein for some time. In truth, the man has not attacked or invaded or launched weapons at anybody in a decade. But - well, he could, they say.
Without any evidence of impending peril other than the accepted fact that Saddam Hussein is a nasty piece of work, deterrence is over.
Writing in Foreign Affiars, former National Security Council director Kenneth Pollack says: "Leaving him free to acquire nuclear weapons and then hoping that in spite of his track record he can be deterred this time around is not the kind of social science experiment the United States government should be willing to run."
So Mr Pollack offers up a prescription for invasion, one which we would be wise to take note of, as his voice is quite influential in this administration.
Moreover, the specificity of his counsel speaks to the details already likely to be in place at the Pentagon: "The military aspects of an invasion, meanwhile, although hardly painless, would be straightforward and well within US capabilities," Mr Pollack writes.
"At this point, the United States could probably smash Iraq's ground forces with a single corps composed of two heavy divisions and an armoured cavalry regiment. To be on the safe side and to handle other missions, however, it would make sense to plan for a force twice that size. Some light infantry will be required in case Saddam's loyalists fight in Iraq's cities. Airmobile forces will be needed to seize Iraq's oil fields at the start of hostilities and to occupy the sites from which Saddam could launch missiles against Israel or Saudi Arabia. And troops will have to be available for occupation duties once the fighting is over.
"All told, the force should total roughly 200,000-300,000 people: for the invasion, between four and six divisions plus supporting units, and for the air campaign, 700-1,000 aircraft and anywhere from one to five carrier battle groups (depending on what sort of access to bases turned out to be possible).
"Building up such a force in the Persian Gulf would take three to five months, but the campaign itself would probably take about a month, including the opening air operations."
Mr Pollack goes on to say that the only country whose co-operation is absolutely needed for such an invasion is Kuwait. Everyone else - Egypt, France, those sort of countries - will come aboard once they realise the US is not kidding around. Finally, he adds with what seems a weary tone, there is the end of the invasion.
"The biggest headaches for the United States are likely to stem not from the invasion itself but from its aftermath. Once the country has been conquered and Saddam's regime driven from power, the United States would be left "owning" a country of 22 million people ravaged by more than two decades of war, totalitarian misrule, and severe deprivation. The invaders would get to decide the composition and form of a future Iraqi government - both an opportunity and a burden."
If this kind of talk worries you, you must understand that people like Mr Pollack are considered moderates in military matters. Earlier this year, a prominent former military officer named William Lind, who is now part of the Free Congress Foundation, was asked by the Marine Corps Gazette to comment on warfare post-September 11th.
He was critical: "Within 48 hours we should have wiped Taliban-held Afghanistan off the map, using nuclear weapons."
So is an invasion of Iraq inevitable? It is difficult not to consider the human factor; Saddam Hussein tried to assassinate George Bush's father and there is the unmistakable aroma of a grudge here, combined with the benefits of a war economy and the cheering of the military, eager to go back and finish off what Mr Bush senior left unresolved.
The only real hope is American public opinion, especially in a moment before an election. A Council on Foreign Relations and Pew Research Centre poll in January found that 73 per cent of Americans favoured taking military action against Iraq, but of those, fully 53 per cent said any action should be conditional on allied support.
Furthermore, the numbers in support fell to 56 per cent if the threat of substantial US casualties were factored in.
Americans are showing a stomach for casualities in fighting those who attacked the US, but it is unlikely their tolerance will extend beyond that.
Mary Russell reports from Baghdad where she finds people blaming the West for their suffering.