WORLD VIEW: 'It's not just [UN disarmament resolution] 1441, it's Saddam Hussein as a threat to the region." So said Colin Powell to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington. Attacking Iraq would cause "some difficulties" during and after the conflict, writes Paul Gillespie.
But "I think there is also the possibility that success could fundamentally reshape that region in a powerful, positive way that will enhance US interests, especially if, in the aftermath of such a conflict, we are also able to achieve progress on Middle East peace."
In his presentation to the UN Security Council there was the same dual emphasis. After giving many details of how Iraq is deceiving the arms inspectors he went on to say it "harbours ambitions for regional domination" in the future.
Together with his case that "hatred and ambition" could bring Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda organisation together this amounts to a dual purpose plan for war. President Bush spoke of plans to bring democracy to Iraq and the wider Middle East region, while Vice-President Cheney has said that Iraq's expansionary ambitions mean Saddam Hussein must be removed.
It is as well these issues are at last coming out in the open as a war moves from the realm of the possible to the probable. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman writes: "The war has two purposes - one stated, one unstated - but both require the same means. The stated purpose is to disarm Iraq. The unstated purpose is to transform it from a totalitarian system that has threatened its neighbours and its own people into something better."
He is struck by the "incredible contrast between the breathtaking audacity of what they intend to do in Iraq . . . and the incredibly narrow base of support that exists in America today for that audacious project." The one invites comparison with the US occupation of Japan under General MacArthur after the second World War, the other with the quick and dirty US invasion of Grenada in 1985. This dual purpose explains the US reserve on a second UN resolution and Bush's statement that "the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others".
The US official argument for a war runs from Iraqi disarmament to preventing Saddam Hussein dominating the region, to a US occupation enhancing its interests (including its crucial oil interests), to democratisation of Iraq, democratisation and marketisation of the region and the pursuit of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
Behind the unstated purpose lies an even more unarticulated premise - that the US can no longer depend on Saudi Arabia, given the untrustworthiness and vulnerability of its regime after 9/11/2001. Iraq must not be the beneficiary of such a regional transformation. This is the war that dares not speak its name until US dependence on Saudi goodwill is at an end.
Such a complex and ambitious purpose recalls imperial/colonial adventures in the past. It must be closely scrutinised precisely because it is so audacious, not only for the validity of the US case made for using force to disarm Iraq - which in this perspective is merely a triggering mechanism for a much more serious purpose - but along the rest of its causal chain as well.
The more one does so the more questions are raised about the assumptions involved and the means and political will available to carry them out. Friedman seriously doubts whether the Bush team or the American people are up to the long-term, difficult, risky, costly and audacious purpose of nation-building and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking involved.
At least 100,000 US troops would be needed for a post-victory peacekeeping force. Already it is being asked whether European governments (including Ireland's) would be willing to contribute. Arab states raised grave questions this week about the regional consequences were the Iraqi state and army to break up after a conflict - its Kurds possibly absorbed by Turkey, the Shias possibly aligning with Iraq and subverting Saudi Arabia's Shia-majority oil-producing province, and Sunni Muslims deeply concerned by a new political imbalance within the Arab world.
Would Iran become the next target of US regional ambition driven by its new strategic doctrine of pre-emptive war, including now military options to use nuclear weapons tactically against Iraqi bunkers? How credible is a US-dominated effort to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, given the uncritical support for Sharon's policies in the Bush administration?
Would the inevitable hostility towards US domination of the Middle East after such a war not bear out a warning given by Archbishop Renato Martino, president of the Vatican's justice and peace department: "The reaction in the Muslim world will be enormous. Acts of terrorism will increase dramatically"?
Is that not made more likely by the fundamentalist Christian influence on the Bush administration? Such sceptical questions lie behind many European attitudes to a war against Iraq - shared, indeed, by many American citizens, as Friedman reports. In another column this week he bewailed the lack of seriousness among European leaders, which he attributes to a structural weakness making them reject US arguments simply to differentiate themselves from the world's only superpower. He finds Europe's cynicism and insecurity, masquerading as moral superiority, insufferable.
It is a silly conclusion based on a valid premise. That European weakness is really exposed in this crisis. But the US is doing its best to prevent it being overcome through a more integrated EU foreign policy, by exploiting political disagreements, many of them tactical, among existing and prospective EU member-states. Europe would reap the whirlwind of such a war in the neighbouring Middle East region. The growing realisation of that fact is likely to drive the EU towards a much more effective foreign and security policy. pgillespie@irish-times.ie