Rupert Cornwell: Be warned, this President means what he says

George Bush has now cleverly turned the argument against the UN: it can't enforce its own resolutions

First, a confession. I have changed my mind. I did believe that, when push came to shove, war against Iraq would not happen. International opinion would deter Washington, and, after a summer of sabre-rattling, normal service would be resumed.

No longer. What finally persuaded me, of course, was President Bush's speech to the United Nations this week. But that speech was no more than the logical conclusion to what Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have long been saying – and, it should be noted, never publicly contradicted by that supposed leader of His American Majesty's loyal Republican opposition, Colin Powell.

The great Republican revolt has fizzled. As I and many others pointed out, the objections of Brent Scowcroft, James Baker and other members of Bush Snr's old high command were always about style, rather than substance. No one disputed that Saddam was a nasty and dangerous piece of work to be got rid of. The question was whether you went through the motions at the UN first.

Bush has now done so, in the process cleverly turning the argument against the UN: what's the value of a world body if it can't enforce the resolutions it does pass? Both America's allies and its homegrown "multilateralists" – including Colin Powell – are happy. The Security Council is being consulted; but even if it withholds formal benediction, the US will make its own decision regardless. Kosovo, moreover, provides a very recent precedent. Certain of Russian opposition, the Nato allies never even went to the Security Council for approval of the bombing campaign against Slobodan Milosevic. In the end, Russia gave a tacit green light anyway.

So much, then, for Iraq seen through the international prism. If anything, the domestic political logic for military action is even more compelling.

As a politician, Bush's strongest selling point is decisiveness. "Moral clarity" (ie his way of submitting issues and individuals to a good-versus-evil litmus test and then going with his gut instinct) is regarded by Europeans as simplistic nonsense. But it worked well enough when al-Qa'ida was the foe, and it looks as if it will work once more now that Saddam has been resurrected as the embodiment of evil.

This President projects himself as a straightshooter, patient but not to be deflected, a man who could not be more different from the evasive and emollient Bill Clinton. Unlike my predecessor, Bush indicates, if I say something I mean it. But if Saddam were to call an American bluff yet again, that reputation would crumble, and the consequences could be dire indeed. The tough guy had blinked, after all, and the Democrats would make hay.

Never forget that in this autumn of 2002, the White House has one overriding domestic goal: to secure re-election two years hence of a President who won last time only after the shenanigans in Florida, having lost the popular vote to Al Gore. Remove George Bush from his pedestal as War President, and you are then left with a leader presiding over an economy perhaps on the brink of a double-dip recession, a leader at the head of an administration viewed as patron of a corporate class that is now tarred with scandal.

But at home, too, the UN speech appears to be doing the trick. Many uneasy multilateralists on Capitol Hill are already sounding happier. My guess is that Bush will win Congressional approval, just as I suspect most of America's allies will, however reluctantly, swing behind him, now that the UN has been brought into the process.

It would be wonderful, of course, if Saddam caved in, allowing UN inspectors speedy and total access, so that the weapons of mass destruction, if not necessarily the man himself, are removed without a shot being fired. Bush would have scored a tremendous triumph, even without "regime change". But the chances of that are remote; far more likely, Saddam the brilliant tactical prevaricator will yet again prove the strategic lunatic, just as he was in 1980 with Iran, and in 1990 when he invaded Kuwait.

In which case a loathsome dictator will be attacked and driven from power.

Try as I will, I cannot see how that will not be a boon to Iraq, to the region and to the world in general. Except for one thing.

My misgivings revolve around another country in the region, whose name also begins with I. It was born amid terrorism of the sort Bush decries today. It does not merely pursue nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, but already possesses them. It, too, is in breach of various UN resolutions.

Why on earth cannot the US see the blindingly obvious and truly lean on Israel as it girds for war against Iraq?

The most valid arguments against a campaign in Iraq are that it will reinforce the Arabs' conviction that the US is at root anti-Arab, and that it will destroy the coalition assembled for the "war against terrorism". But the Arab component of that "coalition" – most obviously Saudi Arabia – has never seemed particularly resolute. Nothing would strengthen that coalition more than the sight of the US reading the riot act to Ariel Sharon over settlements and Israel's return to its 1967 borders. But it won't happen. Of that we may be as sure as we are that Bush will go to war against Iraq.

rupertcornwell@hotmail.com