The rhetoric over Iraq is reaching a dangerous pitch

President Saddam Hussein lashed out defiantly yesterday, returning the Bush Administration's axis of evil rhetoric in kind and vowing that "evil tyrants and oppressors" would never defeat him. There are many reasons not to feel sympathy with him, starting with the suffering he has brought on his people by diverting cash from permitted oil sales away from the needy. Yet the shameless sabre-rattling that is issuing from Washington and being echoed from London should be just as worrying as the defiance from Baghdad, if not more so.

Where President Saddam is posturing from a position of weakness, Washington is piling up threats that it has the capacity to act upon. The British Prime Minister breathes hot and cold. Questioned by a Commons committee on Tuesday, he appeared to stand full square behind the Washington hawks. In Parliament yesterday, he said that Iraq's weapons had to be dealt with, but that any action would comply with international law.

Whatever Mr Blair said yesterday about no decision having been taken on military action, the impression created recently in Washington and London has been quite the opposite. We have been treated to elaborate details of a leaked Pentagon plan for a US-led assault on Iraq. We have been told of top-secret US and British special agents already in place in Iraq. We have watched prominent Iraqi exiles in the United States lavish interviews on the media about their readiness to topple President Saddam. And we have witnessed a huge gathering of Iraqi exiles in London, who formed a co-ordinating committee to the selfsame end.

The most positive interpretation would be that Washington is merely trying to scare Baghdad, in the hope perhaps of triggering a revolt among the top brass or scaring Saddam Hussein into complying with the UN weapons inspection regime. The unconcealed joy in Washington over the latest failure of UN-Iraq talks, however, suggests that Iraqi compliance is not high on US priorities. Which leaves open the possibility that the US is preparing action against Iraq as a contingency to save Mr Bush's political skin and that of his Republican Party at the autumn mid-term Congressional elections. Such cynical application of military force would be recklessness of the highest order. That this prospect seems more than marginally plausible is the severest of indictments on the image that the Bush regime has projected abroad.