President Bush will have to shock the American people into war

Over the last year I've made a couple of firm predictions. The first was that sooner or later George Bush would launch a war to topple Saddam Hussein; the second was that the American people would regain their sense of balance in the aftermath of the 11 September bombings – ie the country of the middle ground would reassert itself. The question now is whether the latter development – for it has come to pass – will cancel out the possibility of the first. Will the return to the centre ground of the majority of American public opinion make it impossible for George Bush to rally domestic support for his plans to oust Saddam?

A headline in yesterday's Washington Post spoke the truth when it declared: "Bush Faces Daunting Task in Building Public Support." It did not say "impossible task", but merely pointed to the danger of attacking Saddam when only 37 per cent of poll respondents believe Bush has clearly explained his rationale for a war with Iraq. If you are about to commit vast numbers of troops with a risk of mass casualties and the wholesale destabilisation of the Middle East, then the least people deserve is an explanation.

Thus has the doctrine of pre-emptive action, so passionately urged by the locker-room tendency on the right, come unstuck. The likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz have been shown to be fearfully out of touch with public sentiment. Not so the worried congressmen and senators who have been besieged with letters, e-mails and calls from constituents. Across America there is an audible shout of "wait a minute". Set aside the so-called Vietnam syndrome, foreign wars have never been intrinsically popular in the US.

Over the last decade the real crisis in international affairs has not been domineering Yankee power but the struggle to make America engage with the rest of the world. In Bill Clinton we saw an instinctively internationalist president who needed to be continually wary of any public perception that he was too busy with "abroad". There is big irony here; it was the Republican right in particular that encouraged isolationist drift but that now finds itself unable, for the time, to convince Americans that it should send their children to fight in the Middle East.

Messrs Perle and Wolfowitz would argue that this time it is very different. This is no Bosnia or Rwanda or Somalia, no appeal to humanitarian instincts, but a situation in which the national interests of the US are directly threatened. Why then do a majority of Americans seem unconvinced of the urgency of the situation? Part of the truth is that President Bush has made little attempt to make a compelling case for war. More specifically he has failed to link 11 September and the horror it represented with Saddam Hussein. People want to know just how Iraq threatens their home town.

There was an assumption that in the climate of moral outrage that followed 11 September, Mr Bush's long-standing desire to get rid of Saddam would have wide support. Also what appeared to be a relatively uncomplicated victory in Afghanistan emboldened the hawks in the White House. The current crisis in "liberated" Afghanistan should tell Mr Bush that the line between confidence and hubris can be perilously close.

I expect that when Mr Bush does present his evidence it will lay out much that we already know. We will be given details of Saddam's chemical and biological weapons capacity. There will be evidence, too, of his attempt to re-launch a nuclear weapons programme, and finally – but critically in terms of public opinion – there will be a dossier on Saddam's links to al-Qa'ida. What none of us can tell until we see the information is whether the intelligence is speculative or solid. Even if the intelligence is less than overwhelming in relation to al-Qa'ida, Mr Bush may win grudging backing for his war. But grudging backing is as bad as no backing if the war starts go wrong.

The assumption that Saddam's army will simply fold as it did during the last Gulf War may turn out to be wrong-headed. The Iraqi leader never committed his best troops to battle, and when the Allied forces stormed into Kuwait and Iraq during Operation Desert Storm they faced waves of miserable conscripts. The real fighting forces were held back to deal with the internal war against the Shia and the Kurds, who, as Saddam anticipated, rose in rebellion when the regime seemed threatened.

During the last Gulf War, Saddam continually underestimated the determination of the Allies to launch an invasion. He did so largely on the basis that he believed the coalition would fall apart as evidence grew of civilian casualties from the air campaign. This time around he will calculate that public opinion in the US and Britain will either forestall an attack, or revolt when the military and civilian cost becomes too high. Saddam may well be willing to allow a war to start in the belief that it will collapse from political pressures well before US armour ever reaches the gates of Baghdad. Thus he has little incentive to cave in now to what are likely to be very tough demands on weapons inspections. If Saddam is convinced that the rest of the world is opposed to war and that the US and Britain are isolated, he will play tough and hope to humiliate Bush before a shot is fired. But it is at this point that American public opinion could swing in behind the President and the countdown to war will have begun.

The list of what-ifs that attend any war scenario is scary. Mr Blair senses this more acutely than his American counterpart, if only because he is more inclined to hear the advice of his own diplomats and intelligence people. Thus when he arrives in Camp David today he will surely be asking how Mr Bush proposes to deal with the prospect of large-scale casualties if Saddam's élite forces make a stand in the cities. How will the US respond if Saddam deploys chemical and biological weapons against Allied forces and against the Israelis? And what does he plan to do for Iraq after Saddam is ousted? Iraq is a country of different nations – Sunni, Shia and Kurd – and could easily slide into Yugoslavia-style anarchy. Mr Bush needs to say whether he plans to turn Iraq into an international protectorate with thousands of Allied troops patrolling the area for years into the future.

But most of all Mr Bush needs to make a compelling case to his own people, and the rest of the world, for going to war in the first place. So expect to see a big public relations campaign to shock the American people into supporting war, with or without wide international support, and expect a sudden increase in the tempo of American efforts to try and win Arab support by pressing Ariel Sharon to talk to the Palestinians. It's hard to believe there will be any meaningful dialogue, and the best Bush can expect is a lowering of anti-war rhetoric from Arab leaders. Also expect Saddam to give a little but not enough and... expect war this winter.

The writer is a BBC special correspondent