We're gonna kill Saddam, but we need an excuse

Senator Joseph Biden, Democrat of Delaware, has announced his intention of holding hearings at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in order to see if the Bush administration will perchance disclose any of its thinking about the future of Iraq. Senator Trent Lott, the Republican leader, recently announced that a constituent of his in Mississippi had demanded to know what was all this about Mr So Damn Insane. Washington currently exists in a weird limbo, where all things press towards an event, but the scale and timing and purpose of that event are unknown. The "event" is the forcible removal from power of the above-mentioned "So Damn". Here is what can be said with certainty. The decision to oust him has already been made. In my opinion, the decision to kill him has also already been made, in that the Administration has stated - without being asked - that it has no plans to put him on trial at The Hague or anywhere else.

A huge amphibious and airborne force is in preparation, which will strike Iraq from every direction at once. The likeliest launching-pads are the Gulf States to the south - with the interesting possible exception of Saudi Arabia - and Turkey to the north.

There is also a side-bet on the Kingdom of Jordan, where the United States would like to station troops and missiles in case Saddam Hussein tries to take revenge on Israel.

All these military details are knowable or discoverable to a quite extraordinary extent. There appears to be complete official indifference to the usual mantras of secrecy and "national security".

Saddam Hussein has not just been warned. He has been tipped off. This argues either for a very high level of confidence on the part of the Pentagon, or for a dimension of psychological warfare that tells Iraq's bloody dictator everything about his future except the date.

However, this also means that Congress, which is supposed to have the sole power to make war, and the United Nations, which is supposed to authorise the international use of force, are likewise kept guessing. For what it is worth, I have been told by some people allegedly in the know that it will be done before the mid-term elections. In other words, there will be a new regime in Baghdad by November. (I was told this before the recent meltdown of the corporate system, a melt-down which might cause some cynics to say that a war was being fought to change the subject away from domestic politics.)

However, if you ask what the political as opposed to the military strategy is supposed to be, you encounter a wall of official silence. Does the United States intend to install a pet general as a military ruler? Does it propose to place the exiled Hashemite monarch - close relative of the King of Jordan - on an improvised throne? Does it plan to hold elections?

Does it plan to keep Iraq as a unitary, if somewhat artificial, state, or allow it to dissolve into a federation of Kurds, Shia and Sunni Muslims? These rather urgent questions are also being asked by the spokesmen for the exiled Iraqi opposition (which itself is divided between civilian and military defectors) and by the leaders of the semi-autonomous enclave in Iraqi Kurdistan.

The Kurds are willing to fight, and to have their territory be used for an intervention, as long as they are not simply used and then discarded, as has happened to them several times in the past.

This confusion also repeats itself in Washington, where the State Department and the CIA are very cold towards the Iraqi National Congress and refuse to meet with its representatives, while the Pentagon is more sympathetic.

Then there is the question of justification. Is Saddam to be removed because of his incubating of hellish weaponry, or because of his ties - via the "axis of evil" - to the forces of Bin-Ladenism?

You may have noticed that the "axis" phrase hasn't been used much lately. You may also have noticed that several alleged contacts between Baghdad and al Qaeda turned out not to be as sinister or as probable as had been first alleged.

Mr Blair, in his latest hints about the connection, has not been able to improve much on this deficit of hard evidence. There are defectors who maintain that Saddam Hussein keeps a back-channel open to the Islamic extremists, on the grounds that every little helps. But we are not certain how trustworthy these informants are.

In its present state, the American public would support the idea of destroying Saddam Hussein if he simply looked at it the wrong way. And we know that for the President himself it is personal: a matter of family honour and of unfinished business. But these reasons, no doubt deeply felt, would not quite do if they were produced before the United Nations Security Council.

Saddam himself has clearly resolved to be on his best behaviour and to offer no pretext. Thus, if there is to be a "trigger" event, it will have to be another quarrel over the right of the international community to inspect Iraqi bunkers and missile sites. And here it does seem that Saddam Hussein would rather fight than give in.

Indeed, some of the Iraqi defectors have told me that his ambition is for an Armageddon-type last stand; an apocalyptic ending that will spur the Arab world to eternal revolt. The difficulty here is that any attack from outside would be deliberately bringing this on.

There is another motive which nobody much talks about. If the United States became the patron of a new Iraq, with some semblance of democratic or lawful government, it would simultaneously become the patron of the world's second-largest proven oil reserves.

And that in turn would mean that it could finally tell the Saudis to - well, finish the sentence for yourself. The time to be raising these questions is now, because the present status quo is not going to last very much longer.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.