Countdown To War

By Michael Elliott

If you're a planner at the Pentagon preparing for war--figuring how to move a flotilla of cargo vessels from San Francisco to the Persian Gulf, worrying whether there's enough shrink-wrap at the port in Jacksonville, Fla., to protect the AH-64 Apache gunships and Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters you've just started to fly there from Fort Campbell, Ky.--there's one thing you always want to keep in the back of your mind. And that is the state of the night sky. The U.S. Air Force likes to begin its bombing campaigns on moonless nights, and in Iraq, for about two weeks in early March, the moon will remain below the horizon until at least 4 a.m.

By then, military officials say, there will be 250,000 American troops on Iraq's doorstep or just down the block. That's more than enough to fight any sort of war that the Pentagon may be thinking of waging. Senior officers insist, with a snappy salute, that they are capable of fighting in an Iraqi summer, but in truth they would rather not. By April, daytime temperatures exceed 100-oF, and soldiers will be hampered by heavy suits protecting them from chemical and biological weapons. Helicopters can't fly as efficiently in hot, thin air; more water has to be shipped to the front for parched and sweaty troops. All of which suggests that from the strictly military standpoint, a war, if there is a war, is more likely to start in March than later.

That fits the diplomatic timetable too. Hans Blix, the head United Nations weapons inspector, who returns from Baghdad this week, will report to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 14 on the degree of Iraqi disarmament and cooperation. On the good assumption that Blix will not give Saddam Hussein's regime a clean bill of health, Security Council members are beginning to consider the shape of a final resolution, though no drafts have yet been circulated.

After Blix reports, deliberations in New York City are bound to take a week or so. And it's a given that Saddam will try to pull some diplomatic stunts to avoid an invasion, as he did in 1991, although President George W. Bush last week made it plain that the U.S. would not tolerate such a "last-minute game of deception. The game is over." So it will probably be sometime during those moonless nights at the beginning of March that the diplomatic phase will finally end and the military one begin. The timing of that endgame has apparently filtered down to the public. In a new TIME/CNN poll, 75% of Americans said they think a war with Iraq is inevitable, up from 63% just three weeks ago.

But inevitability is rarely the mother of enthusiasm. If Americans are looking forward to a war with Iraq, they are keeping their emotions well hidden. In the TIME/CNN poll, 77% said they think a war would make acts of terrorism in the U.S. more likely, and 63% said the prospect of war made them more fearful for the country. "No one wants to go to war," said Russ Alters, 60, in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, last week, expressing a sentiment that would have been just as common on the streets of Dusseldorf or Damascus. The Administration has always worried that public support for a war--especially one waged without backing from a broad international coalition--was soft. To gain maximum support, the Administration still needs to sell the case for action to two distinct constituencies--first, ordinary Americans, and second, the diplomats who gather in the Security Council. And that is why, when it wanted to make the case last week that Saddam is a danger to safety and security everywhere, it turned to the man Americans and the world trust more than any other: Secretary of State Colin Powell.

Powell, we sometimes forget, is a phenomenon, a chapter from tomorrow's history books walking right in front of us. It isn't just the unique resume that demands respect; it's also the presence and the personality--the unforced authenticity and effortless sense of command while he refers to himself as just "an old Army trooper"--that stills and fills a room. Ordinary Americans know that. "There's nobody better to represent us," said Sanford Licht, 72, in Sherman Oaks, Calif. "A military guy, a minority guy. He epitomizes what goes on in America." And Powell's colleagues are every bit as aware of his star wattage. "Who else?" said a senior White House official, when asked whether there had been any debate about the Administration's messenger to the U.N. last week.

Who else, indeed? In the TIME/CNN poll, 56% thought Bush was doing a good job handling Iraq, but 83% approved of Powell's performance as Secretary of State. The Secretary threw himself into the task. He spent hours rehearsing the speech, even rearranged the furniture in one office of the U.S. mission to the U.N. so that it resembled the Security Council chamber. He checked and rechecked the information he was given and more than once refused to put into the speech details that hard-liners on Iraq wanted there but that Powell felt the available intelligence did not support. "He was only going to do the stuff that he was personally confident of and comfortable with," said his old friend and former White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein.

In one instance, Powell took the lead in toughening up the presentation. He thought that the International Atomic Energy Agency had been too quick to endorse Iraq's claims that imported aluminum tubes were designed for rockets, not for use in nuclear-processing plants. Powell personally grilled CIA experts on the tubes and was told that U.S. intelligence had spun some of the intercepted tubes at the extreme speeds required to enrich uranium. Rocket tubes would have shattered--these withstood the strain. The discussion of the tubes was a high point in a performance that took almost 1 1/2 hours. When it was over, Powell had done about as much as any member of the Administration could to convince the world that Saddam was cheating the inspectors, hiding weapons of mass destruction, maneuvering to acquire nuclear weapons and in league with terrorists from al-Qaeda.

The difficulty is this: lots of people already knew that or at least suspected it. The issue is what to do now and how to make the case for war. As a senior diplomat at the U.N. said, "The Security Council is not arguing about whether Iraq is cooperating with the inspectors. Everyone but the Syrians acknowledges that it is not. The question is, Should we go to war?" Neither the Security Council nor the American public have answered that question unambiguously in the affirmative.

But public opinion is coming around. At coffee shops and water coolers, Powell's performance won high marks. To be sure, there are plenty of Americans like Vicki Pollyea, an Air Force colonel's daughter in Tampa, Fla., who feel "we're jumping into something extremely dangerous without world support, and it has a real feeling of Vietnam." But in the TIME/CNN poll, 17% said Powell had changed their mind. Before his speech, they opposed sending troops to Iraq; now they favored it. "It scared me," said Abby Headrick, 20, a University of Georgia junior, of the speech. "I had no idea Saddam had so much access to materials to make nuclear weapons."

After Powell's presentation, fewer Americans made their support for war conditional on U.N. backing. In the TIME/CNN poll, 36% said they would be prepared to send troops to Iraq even if the U.N. opposed it, up from 27% in mid-January. But even so, the Administration is acutely conscious that most Americans polled prefer that any war have the U.N.'s backing.

Will that be forthcoming? Immediately after Powell spoke, the world was treated to the less than edifying spectacle of Council members reading out potted set pieces stressing the need to give the inspectors more time--"Idiots sitting there with these prepackaged statements," as one of Powell's aides frustratedly put it. But the public responses mattered not at all compared with what was said privately. Powell had hardly uttered his last sentence when behind-the-scenes U.S. lobbying of Security Council members commenced.

Some conversations must have been delicious, but none more so than the polite phone call made by Vice President Dick Cheney, once a bitter opponent of Marxist liberation movements in Africa, to the Soviet-educated, former communist President Jose Eduardo dos Santos of Angola. Generally, the Administration got a good reception. "We're realistic enough to be on the side of the 800-lb. gorilla rather than between the gorilla and Iraq," confessed a senior diplomat from one Council member nation. China and Russia, both with veto power in the Council, said Powell's speech had changed little, but neither is thought likely to nix a new resolution. "Russia," said a Foreign Ministry official in Moscow, "isn't going to mess up its relationship with the U.S. because of Iraq." China, say Security Council diplomats, is playing a curiously docile role, but few think it will stand in the way of the U.S. "If Powell can convince the other countries that war is necessary," says Chu Shulong, director of the Institute of Strategic Studies at Tsinghua University, "China will go along with them. Beijing is pleased by improvements in relations between the two countries and reluctant to do anything that would jeopardize them."

That leaves--fanfare, please--the French. Their role throughout the Iraq crisis has baffled and frequently infuriated observers. In the fall, when French diplomats were crucial to the drafting of Security Council Resolution 1441, President Jacques Chirac cleverly positioned himself close to the Bush Administration while maintaining a degree of independence. But in the past few weeks, the French line against a war has hardened, and on Jan. 20, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin went out of his way, without warning Powell, to oppose a rush to war in a public ambush at the U.N.

Powell was furious, but the French claimed they were motivated by high principle. "For us," said an official at the presidential Elysee Palace, "the key question is whether the threat from Iraq is of such a nature and amplitude as to justify a war. Our government and most of European public opinion don't think so." On its face, that suggests France would veto a resolution authorizing war--something it has not done since the Suez crisis in 1956. But to do so would invite the U.S. to go to war without U.N. sanction, as Bush has said he would, and would effectively wreck the Security Council, along with France's pretensions of being a great power.

Hence the French dilemma. "If they veto," says a U.N. diplomat, "that's a permanent slap at the U.S.'s face--very dangerous--and they threaten to make the Security Council irrelevant. If France abstains, it's not a player. If it votes yes, Chirac looks like a weather vane." Small wonder that, according to several sources, French Foreign Minister de Villepin was openly agitated--"shrill," said one observer--at the meetings in New York last week. ("All you talk about is war. That's all you want to talk about," de Villepin said to Powell at a lunch after his speech.) But if Blix returns from Baghdad with a report damning Saddam, he will give the French a ladder to humbly climb down, the U.S. will have its resolution, and Saddam will have a few days to figure out whether to save his hide in exile or face the might of American armed forces.

Those at the sharp end of any war were, as usual, going about their business last week with studied unconcern for stuff they didn't have time to worry about. At a firing range in the northern Kuwaiti desert, Marine Corporal Edon Willis, 23, who had spent most of the past week unpacking his kit and training, was asked what he thought about Powell's performance. "We didn't hear about any speech," he said. "We're just waiting for our orders." They're coming. --With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and Michael Weisskopf/Washington; James Graff/Paris; Marguerite Michaels/U.N.; Simon Robinson/Kuwait City with other bureaus

With reporting by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and Michael Weisskopf/Washington; James Graff/Paris; Marguerite Michaels/U.N.; Simon Robinson/Kuwait City with other bureaus