During the past few weeks, newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic have revealed in breathless terms the latest plan to invade Iraq.
They have described massive thrusts by armour from all sides; airborne attacks to take out Baghdad; vast seaborne raids. Saddam Hussein, according to one version, will be removed by dissidents inserted into Iraq backed by US Special Forces. Alternatively, Saddam will be taken out in a precision strike.
Civilian officials in the Bush administration have huffed and puffed about the "leaks", to the amusement of the intelligence and military professionals. "One thing you can say with an awful lot of certainty," one told The Observer newspaper in London last week, "is that there is going to be an awful lot of deception going on over the next few months."
Deception is one of the oldest of the military’s black arts. But the fact of the existence of deception is important in itself. It is, in the terminology of these things, a "combat indicator"—one of the clues that suggest things are fast on the road to getting bloody.
And not all of it is necessarily deception. There have been other signs suggesting a campaign against Iraq. Manufacturers of cruise missiles and precision-guided munitions in the US have been working overtime to replace the weapons expended in Afghanistan. The American military transport fleet of trucks has been ordered in for rapid servicing and camouflaging. Elsewhere, US fighting vehicles in Kuwait have been taken out of mothballs where they were left at the end of the Gulf War.
The question now appears to be not whether there will be a war, but when. The answer is that in war, as other matters, timing is all.
For US President George W. Bush that timing will be dictated by the demands of a domestic political agenda. With the economy in the middle of what now looks like a doubledip recession, Bush has been left with only two policies he can sell as a success: the war against terrorism and the war against Saddam.
The war against terrorism is a problematic one. Afghanistan remains a mess. Osama Bin Laden and many of his senior lieutenants remain unaccounted for.
Declaring victory would not only be precipitous but dangerous. Which leaves Saddam
But when to act Current thinking on both sides of the Atlantic is that Bush will not want to risk a war that does not begin until well into next year, as that would bring him too close to the time when he wants to be engaged in his campaign for reelection. That leaves this winter.
Finally, there remains the question of what form the war might take. Insiders have insisted that the absolute minimum force requirement must be three heavy armoured divisions plus an air assault division. A likely force size, say experts, is 100,000 to 120,000 troops, probably launched from Kuwait and Qatar.

What are the US troops doing now