Analysis: War is almost upon us - but how did it come to this? The new Bush Doctrine says: 'We cannot let our enemies strike first. The United States can no longer rely on a reactive posture'

How did it come to this, and so quickly? History can be a rollercoaster ride. But for all the markers along the way, it is still hard to understand how in 18 short months the ride has led from Osama bin Laden to Saddam Hussein; from a nightmarish day of terrorist attacks in the United States to an unprovoked war against a country that had nothing to do with those attacks.

On 11 September 2001 America had the sympathy of the world. Now, as 200,000 of its troops stand poised to invade Iraq, with 40,000-plus from its faithful ally Britain alongside, attitudes have been transformed. America, or more accurately perhaps, the people who run America, have rarely been so mistrusted, disliked, even hated.

"Nous sommes tous des Américains" ran the famous headline in Le Monde the next day. Not any more. Today the discourse between the US and its oldest ally France runs to puerile slanging matches, pitting the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" mocked on late-night US television shows against "a small village populated by cretins", as a political puppet show on French television has dubbed the White House.

But these are trifles compared to the real collateral damage of the Iraq crisis. Nato, which in the wake of 11 September invoked for the first time a solidarity clause in support of a wounded America, last month suffered one of the most serious splits in its history over helping Turkey, another alliance member, prepare for a possible war. The European Union, yet again, has been shown up as powerless and divided.

The worst fate of all perhaps awaits the United Nations, should the second resolution on Iraq, tabled by the US, Britain and Spain, fail to pass the Security Council, only for President George Bush and Tony Blair to attack Iraq regardless. The credibility of the UN would surely then be destroyed, as the lone superpower – which had never much cared for the place anyway – served notice that it would do as it pleased in the world.

Again, one asks, how did it come to this? At one level the course may be simply charted. Iraq had been exercising important minds in the US and elsewhere, well before the terrorist attacks. For a decade, British as well as American warplanes have been sparring with Iraqi air defences as they patrolled the northern and southern no-fly zones set up after the first Gulf war.

In February 2001, barely a month after Mr Bush's inauguration, Tony Blair travelled to Camp David to meet the new President for the first time. They discussed Iraq, which had been free of UN weapons inspectors since late 1998, and agreed Saddam Hussein remained a menace to his region and the world. Then came the attacks on New York and Washington.

It is true to say 11 September changed the world. Certainly the attacks demonstrated a superpower's vulnerability to a new type of enemy. But far more important for the rest of us, the wounded American giant resolved to use his awesome power as he chose, to resolve the problem once and for all. In that sense, the world has truly changed.

The immediate task was Afghanistan, the base country for Bin Laden. The air war started on 7 October 2001, and within a couple of months the Taliban government had been overturned and the terrorist camps destroyed. Though Bin Laden himself may have escaped, many of his lieutenants have been killed or captured, most lately Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the chief organiser of the 11 September attacks who was seized in Rawalpindi at the weekend.

But as Mr Bush constantly emphasised, the defeat of the Taliban was only a beginning. Saddam Hussein, it soon transpired, was next on the list. In President Bush's January 2002 State of the Union address, he declared that the greatest danger to America lay where terrorism, rogue states, and weapons of mass destruction intersected. He then set out his "axis of evil", consisting of Iran, North Korea and, naturally, Iraq.

At the start of June, another piece fell into place when Mr Bush delivered the commencement address to the graduating class at West Point military academy. For the first time, he claimed the right to launch pre-emptive strikes on countries deemed a threat, before the US itself had been attacked.

The "Bush Doctrine" would take formal shape in the national security strategy unveiled in September. "We cannot let our enemies strike first," it said. "The United States can no longer solely rely on a reactive posture as we have in the past." Where possible, America would try to win the support of the international community, but it added: "We will not hesitate to act alone if necessary to exercise our right of self defence by acting pre-emptively."

Never again, President Bush pledged, would the US allow its military might to be challenged as it had been by the Soviet Union. The strategy suggested the US might develop new weapons to this end, even a new generation of smaller nuclear weapons. The 31-page document was the most muscular, America-first, approach to foreign policy since the Reagan era. And as only the wilfully blind could fail to see, Iraq was top of the hit-list.

By summer, hardly a day passed without a threat from a senior Bush official against Baghdad, and scarcely a week without the leak of a Pentagon battle plan to The New York Times or The Washington Post. The message was unchanging: either President Saddam disarmed voluntarily, or he would be disarmed by force in a campaign that the desert weather and the 2004 Presidential election date already dictated should be in the early months of this year. In July, Vice-President Dick Cheney went further, proclaiming it a waste of time to deal with Iraq through the UN. Washington, he argued, should just get on with it.

In fact, Mr Blair joined with an alarmed Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, to persuade Mr Bush to take the multilateral route. The Prime Minister was as convinced as Mr Bush that President Saddam's removal was necessary, and justified. A new, uncompromising UN resolution, he argued, would lend the enterprise even greater authority and thus increase the pressure on Iraq to comply. But in the President's 12 September speech to the General Assembly, he made clear it was "a last chance" for President Saddam, and for the world body to show it had the will to enforce the resolutions flouted by the Iraqi leader since the first Gulf war in 1990-91.

With the American pistol pointed at its head, the Security Council passed Resolution 1441 after seven weeks of intricate negotiation, sending back the weapons inspectors and giving President Saddam a few months, at most, to show he had got rid of his missiles and chemical and biological weapons. Baghdad made some concessions: a scientist available for interview here, a chemical munitions warhead discovered there. But by late January, even the patience of General Powell, the administration's in-house "dove", had run out.

Last weekend, Iraq began destroying its al-Samoud missiles, as Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, had ordered. But Mr Bush was not for turning. On Friday, his spokesman dismissed the entire UN process as a charade by insisting that Iraq could be disarmed only if President Saddam was removed. Regime change, in other words, had been the name of the game all along, although most of the rest of the world did not consider Iraq a great threat to anyone, least of all the US.

So today, almost a quarter of a million American and British troops stand massed in the Gulf, coiled to strike. But this is a largely unwanted war. Mr Bush may secure his "coalition of the willing". But public opinion is resolutely hostile. When pollsters in Europe and elsewhere ask who is the greatest threat to world peace, the reply is not Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden or Kim Jong Il. It is George Bush.

Personalities have much to do with America's monumental global image problem. At home, the swaggering Donald Rumsfeld, the icily determined Mr Cheney, and President Bush himself, strike a can-do, macho chord. But beyond US shores, they are Ugly Americans made flesh. The caricature of President Bush in that French puppet show expresses the widespread popular belief that the planet is at risk of being blown up by a witless, trigger-happy Texan, guided by a righteous God he discovered after one too many nights on the tiles.

Some of his countrymen are also anxious. As Joe Klein, the leading political columnist and author of Primary Colors, noted recently in Time magazine: "George W Bush lives at the intersection of faith and inexperience. This is not a reassuring address, especially in a time of trouble."

But even the uncomplicated convictions of a President who sees the world in black and white, and the maddening durability of Saddam Hussein do not explain why America is so obsessed with Iraq. For the origins of this seemingly inevitable Gulf War of 2003, we must look as far back as the short and accidental Presidency of Gerald Ford.

IT IS an extraordinary tale, of a small group of defence intellectuals who have wrought the biggest change in US foreign policy thinking in a quarter-century, and who are now to be found at the heart of the Bush administration. They are not, as conspiracy theorists would have it, a sinister cabal bent on taking over the world. They are simply lifelong promoters of an American idea whose time has come.

It all began with "Team B". Back in the mid-Seventies, the Central Intelligence Agency (then under the direction of George Bush the elder) was accused by Cold War hawks of playing down the Soviet threat to please its political masters in the Ford administration, who were then pursuing a policy of détente with the Kremlin. So a "Team B" of hardliners was set up to second-guess the available evidence. It concluded that the Kremlin was willing to spend the Soviet Union into penury to win the nuclear arms race.

Whether the hardliners were right may be disputed, and in any event it was the Reagan-era Pentagon that spent the Soviet Union into the ground. But consider some of Team B's members: Mr Rumsfeld (then, as now, Secretary of Defence), Paul Wolfowitz, now his deputy, and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, chief of staff to Mr Cheney, arguably the most influential vice-President in American history. Team B had other important outriders, notably Richard Perle, who was then a senior aide of the ferocious anti-Communist, Senator Henry Jackson.

In the Reagan administration, Mr Perle became an assistant Secretary of Defence, known as the "Prince of Darkness" for his opposition to nuclear arms control. Today he heads the defence policy board, an important independent advisory panel to the Pentagon. Mr Perle's old protégé, Douglas Feith, holds the Pentagon's third-ranking post, of under-Secretary of Defence for Policy. All are instinctive hawks, who insist America must not underestimate the terrorist threat now, any more than the Soviet threat a quarter of a century ago. They believe that to unchain American power is to release a unique force for human advancement. They also believe that in 1991, George Bush senior made a grievous mistake in not going all the way to Baghdad and finishing off Saddam Hussein there and then. Of them, none is more fervent in this conviction than Mr Wolfowitz.

Mr Wolfowitz, like the others, believes that fortune favours the brave. But he has little of Mr Rumsfeld's bravado. He is soft-spoken and mild-mannered. Mr Bush refers to him as "Wolfie", but a less lupine individual is hard to imagine.

No one has been on the Iraq case longer and more persistently than Mr Wolfowitz. That tenacity is a large reason why the Iraq debate in Washington has moved so quickly from theoretical possibility to the precise timing of an invasion (though many would contend that even the date has long been virtually set in stone).

In 1992, the last year of the first Bush Administration when Mr Wolfowitz held Mr Feith's present job and Dick Cheney ran the Pentagon, he put together an updated "Defence Planning Guidance", a strategy blueprint for future US military leaders. It proposed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States doctrine should be to assure that no new superpower arose to threaten America's benign domination.

Washington would defend its unique status by sheer military power, but also by being such a constructive force in world affairs that no one would want to challenge it. America would participate in coalitions, but on an ad hoc basis. The US would be "postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated". The document called for pre-emptive attacks against states bent on acquiring nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Among the hypothetical wars, Mr Wolfowitz imagined, was one against a Saddam Hussein out to avenge defeat in the 1990-91 Gulf war.

A decade ago this was red meat indeed, and the final text was watered down. But the document sets out exactly the thinking that underpins today's intended Pax Americana. Entire paragraphs might have been reprinted word for word in the national security strategy of last September.

Every political movement however needs a public spokesman and a platform. In Bill Kristol and the Weekly Standard, the neo-conservatives found them. From the unpromising springboard of chief of staff to former Vice-President Dan Quayle, the brainy and engaging Mr Kristol emerged as the beaming face of muscular neo-conservatism. In 1994 he persuaded Rupert Murdoch to bankroll a new conservative magazine. The Weekly Standard must lose Mr Murdoch a fortune. It is apt not to let facts get in the way of a good polemic but like many right-wing publications it is highly readable and something of a house magazine for many Republicans.

In 1997, Mr Kristol published a manifesto called Project for the New American Century. Among the first signatories were the old Team B crowd of Messrs Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Libby, as well as Mr Cheney. Other names included Elliott Abrams, now the Middle East section chief at the National Security Council, and Zalmay Khalilzad, Mr Bush's new "special envoy for a liberated Iraq" (and who was in Kurdish northern Iraq last week, trying with little success to unite opposition groups behind America's plans for the post-Saddam era). Another signatory was Francis Fukuyama, author of The End of History, the famous celebration of the definitive triumph of American-style liberal democracy. Almost six years on, the Project makes fascinating reading.

It contained four main recommendations: to increase defence spending; to challenge "regimes hostile to US interests and values"; to promote political and economic freedom around the globe and to "extend an international order friendly to our security, prosperity and values". In December 1997, the Standard ran an issue with the cover "Why Saddam Must Go". Mr Wolfowitz was one contributor. So too was Robert Kagan, the conservative thinker whose now-famous 2002 essay Power and Weakness touched nerves now being rubbed raw in the confrontation over Iraq, between the US and what Mr Rumsfeld sneeringly dismissed as "old Europe".

For Mr Kagan, Americans are from Mars, tough guys ready to use force to achieve what they believe to be right. Europeans, by contrast, are softies, instinctive appeasers who think no problem exists which cannot be solved by sufficient concessions. It is a caricature, to be sure, but like most caricatures it contains a kernel of truth.

By the turn of the millennium, America's Iraq hawks had in place the people, the philosophy and the project. All that was missing was power. But that too arrived when George Bush won the White House in 2000, having employed several members of Team B and associates among his foreign policy advisers.

In the new Administration, the neo-conservatives established two key strongholds, the Pentagon and the Vice-President's office. The State Department, and to a lesser extent the CIA, might be counterweights. But State was losing influence in the wider struggle.

Around today's world, the symbols of American power are less its diplomats than its military bases, and the regional commanders among whom the planet is divided like provinces of the Roman Empire.

With them, the neo-conservatives brought two core beliefs. The threat from terrorism and rogue states was greater than imagined (just as Team B believed of the Seventies Soviet menace) but, just like Communism, they could be defeated. Second, with the Cold War won, the US had an opportunity – nay, an obligation – to spread its triumphant values around the world.

The tragic events of 11 September 2001 fused those separate strands into one. The spread of American power and values was not only desirable. It was essential for America's very survival. And a frightened country was ready to believe it.

Within days of the attacks, Mr Wolfowitz was pressing the Iraq issue, urging that the US "end" states which backed terrorism. General Powell and others said it was too early; there was a war to win in Afghanistan, and there was no evidence of Iraqi involvement in the terrorist outrages. On 15 September Mr Bush summoned his top advisers to Camp David to plot a response. Iraq, inevitably, came up, but even Mr Rumsfeld opposed going after President Saddam so soon. At one point Mr Wolfowitz interrupted his boss, says Bob Woodward in his book Bush at War, and had to be dressed down by Andrew Card, the President's chief of staff.

But Mr Wolfowitz did not give up. Instead the get-Saddam faction reverted to the old Team B tactic: if the CIA could not come up with the goods to support your case, find some other intelligence that did indicate Iraq was linked with al-Qa'ida and 11 September. If that could be done, even America's most unrelenting critics would surely agree that President Saddam had to go.

Not only was the CIA under intense pressure to magnify evidence of any links between Iraq and terrorist groups, and of its possible involvement in 11 September. At the Pentagon, Mr Feith set up a new intelligence gathering unit on Iraq, which fed its choicest morsels to the White House.

In fact, claims of a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, and an Iraqi intelligence agent were never substantiated, and the feeblest part of Mr Powell's otherwise impressive presentation on Iraq to the Security Council on 5 February was his assertion of "a sinister nexus" between the Baghdad regime and al-Qa'ida. Even so, polls continue to show that up to half of all Americans believe President Saddam had a hand in 11 September.

Mr Bush, in any case, had long made up his mind to get rid of the Iraqi dictator, with or without the blessing of the UN. If he had not taken the basic decision before 11 September, it was surely not long after. A complex world that could now be subjected to a simple litmus test: are you with or against us? President Saddam, self-evidently, was against. And so, for the second and almost certainly the last time, the Iraqi leader finds himself staring down the barrel of an American gun.

MAYBE PAUL Wolfowitz is right. In Vietnam, the hawks made the crucial error of believing that Communism, not nationalism, was the driving force of the war. But in almost every argument since over the use of force they have been vindicated, and the peace camp has been proved wrong.

They and Ronald Reagan were correct in arguing that, if confronted, the "evil empire" of Soviet Communism would collapse. They were right over the first Gulf War to liberate Kuwait, which aroused considerably more domestic political opposition than the utterly unprovoked war on which Washington is about to embark. The hawks were right over Bosnia, and they were right over Kosovo. In 1999, predictions abounded of a Balkan Vietnam in which the Western forces would be tied down in a bloody ground war amid fierce partisan resistance. It did not happen.

And can anyone pretend that the former Serbia is not a better place today, no longer a menace to its neighbours, under democratic rule and with Slobodan Milosevic on trial for war crimes? Ditto Afghanistan, and the talk that the US would go the way of would-be British and Soviet conquerors before it.

Why should Iraq not prove another such success? President Saddam's army is only half as strong, at most, as in 1991. It is perfectly possible that the Americans will be greeted with cheers, not jeers or shots. If the war is speedy – better still if President Saddam agrees to go into exile – then all the spats between the US and its allies may soon be forgotten. George Bush and Tony Blair will go down in history as the President and the Prime Minister who dared, and won. Rogue states around the world would be served a terrible lesson about what happens when you defy America's will.

And, just possibly, regime change in Iraq will set in motion the second part of the Wolfowitz project, the transformation of the whole Middle East for the better. At the least, it will enable the US to end its military presence in Saudi Arabia, removing an irritant and resentment which has fuelled the terrorist cause. At best, as Mr Bush insists, a peaceful, prosperous and "democratic" Iraq will prove a "beacon" for the region, enabling even the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to be tackled in a new light.

But the risks are immense. Some Pentagon commanders fear the campaign will be anything but the cakewalk their civilian superiors expect. And even the Bush Administration does not dispute that a protracted war in Iraq, with large civilian casualties, would be the most powerful recruiter of all for al-Qa'ida. Afterwards, tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of American and British troops may be needed, to maintain order until a stable Iraqi government is born.

Even then, Iraq may simply fall apart. Its disintegration would destabilise the entire region. The Kurdish north, already largely autonomous, could prove an irresistible magnet for the creation of a Kurdish state, creating massive tensions with Turkey in particular. The Shia south would gravitate naturally towards Shia Iran, creating new imbalances around the Gulf.

There are even darker prophecies as well. Will the mission to "liberate" Iraq become a reordering of the Middle East, whose main beneficiary is not Iraq, or ordinary Arabs, but Israel? Some see war as the pretext for the Ariel Sharon government trying to end the Palestinian problem once and for all; not with a "Final Status" agreement, but by expelling them to Jordan, especially if President Saddam in his death throes launches rockets against Israeli cities. This time, Mr Sharon has warned he will retaliate, unlike his predecessor Yitzak Shamir when Saddam's Scuds hit Israel in 1991.

And where will it stop? "Wimps stop at Baghdad" cry the neo-conservative extremists. If Iraq rolls over, then why not Iran, or North Korea, or anyone else the America does not approve of? More likely though, US policy-making capacity will be overwhelmed, causing some terrible blunder.

Nowhere is such a risk greater than over North Korea. Plainly, the regime in Pyongyang has chosen this moment of American fixation with Iraq to reactivate its nuclear weapons programme. Is this merely a gesture to draw the US into bilateral negotiations? At least as likely, it is the entirely rational policy of a regime which calculates that unless it goes nuclear, it too will get the President Saddam treatment.

Even America, the hyper-power, with all its commanders, its aircraft carrier groups, and its superbly equipped armed forces, cannot be everywhere at once. And after Iraq it may not be able to rely on co-operation from supposed allies. The Pentagon maintains it can cope with two major regional wars simultaneously, winning one swiftly and holding the line in the other until reinforcements can be sent. Once that seemed armchair musing. North Korea is turning it into a fearsome possibility.

Britain, too, is shackled to the Iraqi venture, by Mr Blair's own strong sense of good and evil, and his oft-stated conviction that partnership with the US is the cornerstone of British foreign policy. As a result we too may find ourselves facing costly military over-stretch, as British armies march anew over old colonial territory.

And is that really what George Bush wants: an America locked for a decade or more into a mission not of liberation but of colonisation, an America under challenge and largely unloved in a world from which, as 11 September showed, it cannot escape? This would be the Hobbesian world that Robert Kagan's he-men from Mars may be able to handle. But might not other countries look at how America has behaved and decide that they have every right to act pre-emptively against a tiresome neighbour? India against Pakistan say, or China against Taiwan?

This world would be ripe for the very proliferation of weapons of mass destruction that the US says it is going into Iraq to prevent.

But there seems no way back from the brink, barring President Saddam's flight into exile. Mr Bush is trapped by the weather, by the domestic political calendar and above all by the absolute necessity not to lose face (or as diplomats say, by the need to "maintain America's credibility"). Mr Blair is trapped by his promises to Mr Bush, and his faith in the transatlantic alliance above all else. President Saddam is going down.

But he will draw a mordant satisfaction that, in its fall, his middling-sized, nasty but no longer very frightening country is tugging at the pillars of the very structures of the postwar world. How, one asks anew, did it come to this?