The problem with this argument is that it ignores the much more straightforward possibility that the Democrats were simply wrong on Iraq — both in the policy they supported and the way they arrived at it. After all, if voters were really dead-set on sending a message of opposition to the war, was it really so hard to know which party to vote for?

The Democrats’ first problem on Iraq was not so much their policy itself as the way they approached the debate. From the get-go, Democrats approached Iraq less as a matter of foreign policy than one of domestic politics — they sought to get through the issue with as little political damage as possible and get back to domestic policy questions, where their political bread was really buttered. That meant dealing with the Iraq question tactically, rather than substantively — as a matter of politics rather than foreign policy. Because of that, over time their message became not whatever particular angle they were pursuing on this or that given day, but their own fundamental unseriousness about national security policy. That impression in itself proved deeply damaging.

On substance, moreover, it’s really not clear that congressional Democrats ever seriously confronted the Iraq question. The truth is that Iraq is a very grave danger to the security of the United States — not in the wing-nut sense of Saddam Hussein setting off nuclear warheads in American cities or dousing us with anthrax the first chance he gets, but a very serious danger nonetheless. Like it or not, the United States is the guarantor of the peace, security and free flow of oil out of the Persian Gulf, the jugular vein of the world economy. For 30 years Saddam has demonstrated a desire to dominate the region. And he’s launched a series of reckless and destructive wars — most notably against Iran and Kuwait — to secure those ends.

So long as Saddam remains on the other side of the nuclear threshold, we can keep him in check with occasional bursts of cruise missiles or whack him back into line with our massive conventional forces if he ever really gets out of line. But once he acquires nuclear weapons he becomes almost infinitely more difficult to control. Rather than our nukes deterring him, Saddam is likely to think — and not without good reason — that his nukes will provide deterrence against us and an umbrella under which he can go back to his old ways.

If Saddam starts muscling Kuwait or Jordan or Saudi Arabia, we’ll be very hard-pressed to deal with the situation. It’s easy enough to say that we’ll nuke him if he nukes the Kuwaitis. But if he calls our bluff, are we going to nuke Baghdad? Do we really want to face that choice? Deterrence really only works — or works well — if you’re dealing with an essentially conservative, rationally acting regime. But, as Kenneth Pollack notes in his recent book, “The Threatening Storm,” that hasn’t really been our experience with Saddam.

In any case, the question of whether we can let Saddam get nukes has already been hashed out. The first Bush administration and then the Clinton administration both pursued a policy that assumed the security of the United States was not compatible with Saddam’s acquiring a serious weapons-of-mass-destruction capacity — particularly nuclear weapons. As long as weapons inspectors roamed the country with some relative freedom and sanctions kept the Iraqi economy on its knees, the matter was more or less in check. But inspectors got kicked out, economic sanctions frayed to the point of nonexistence, and the geopolitical costs of our keeping those sanctions in place grew rapidly. For the last several years, Saddam may have been “in the box,” but we’ve been in there with him. And he’s been having a better time of it than we have.

The simple fact is that American foreign policy has for more than a decade been based on our unwillingness to allow Saddam to acquire the bomb. The policies we’d been using to hold him in check have broken down. And we’re thus faced with a simple decision: accept what we’d been unwilling to accept — a nuclear-armed Saddam; find some way to get Saddam back in check; or settle our beef with him once and for all, as the White House proposes. For all the administration’s swaggering indifference to international institutions and simplistic readings of the dynamics of Middle Eastern politics, this is a basic fact that the administration confronted squarely and the Democrats did not.

The Democrats had excuses aplenty — many of them valid. The Democrats wanted the president to make the case for the necessity of war. Fair enough. But it was never clear why the president had to “make his case” before the Democrats could figure out what their own Iraq policy should be. Other Democrats argued that, as important as Iraq might be, our first priority is al-Qaida, and going after Iraq now might hobble our more pressing struggle against terrorism. Again, good argument. But it would be a lot more convincing if these same Democrats had been pushing to resolve the Iraq question before Sept. 11. And of course most of them weren’t. That fact makes this argument sound like what, for most of them, it was: an excuse.

It’s certainly not that the president’s policies weren’t without their fooleries and missteps. The president started down this course by confronting not only Iraq but needlessly doing the same with most of our allies and international institutions we ourselves had created. Administration policymakers painfully misjudged the relationship between Iraq and the bloodletting on the West Bank. They needlessly mixed up the case on Iraq with a much broader and more iffy doctrine of “preemption.” And Dick Cheney and other administration hawks thought a good talking-to would be all that was needed to get the moderate Arab states on board. Over the course of the last year the administration has stumbled from one permutation of its policy to the next, finally settling on a plan to work through the U.N., a policy it had earlier rejected.

If the Democrats had their own coherent policy on Iraq they might have been able to make political hay out of the administration’s record of missteps and course corrections. But since the Democrats really had no policy to speak of, the fact that the president was at least confronting the problem squarely made him the winner in the debate.

Over the last decade, says Tom Diaz of the Violence Policy Center, there has been increasing civilian interest in the weapons, methods, and mythology of sniping. A simple visit to Amazon.com reveals dozens of books about the history of sniping, the craft and techniques, how-to guides for sniping and worshipful paeans to sniper heroism. A recent movie, “Enemy at the Gates,” dramatized a duel between snipers at the battle of Stalingrad. There’s also a long list of sniper Web sites with information on sniping, schools to obtain training, the latest equipment, and bulletin boards filled with talk about various sniping issues. The allure of sniperdom is captured in the motto “one shot — one kill,” a phrase that captures the mix of precision, patience and lethality which is at the heart of what professional snipers do.

According to Diaz, who authored a 1999 report on the sniper subculture, the gun industry as well as gun advocacy groups like the NRA have catered to the growing sniper subculture by marketing weapons specially designed for sniping as well as instructional books, videos and Web sites that teach the techniques and mythology of the sniper’s craft. “I’m certainly not going to advocate censorship,” Diaz told Salon on Monday. “But it cries out for political and ethical and moral leadership. We’re teaching people skills and techniques that have only to do with killing people.”

Also of concern is the ease with which civilians can obtain advanced sniper training. Many of the luminaries of the sniper subculture are ex-U.S. military snipers who’ve gone into business writing books, producing videotapes and in some cases training sessions. One of the gurus of the sniper subculture is Maj. John L. Plaster, who runs Ultimatesniper.com and is the author of books like “The Ultimate Sniper: An Advanced Training Manual for Military and Police Snipers” (soon to be out in a new Spanish language edition.) Some ex-military instructors will only train military or police in the craft. Others will teach more or less anyone who wants to learn.

On Tuesday Salon conducted an e-mail interview with the administrator of one of the most popular sniping Web sites, Scott Powers of Snipercountry.com.

Can you tell us the range of people who are part of the sniper subculture, from military professionals to civilian enthusiasts, and how what they do may or may not relate to what’s happening in the D.C. suburbs?

I have to point out to you at this stage that the “sniper culture” does not really exist. It seems to be a media-created buzzword in reaction to the murders in Maryland and Virginia. Most long-range precision shooters get into their hobby for reasons of competition and improving their skills, but it does not make them “snipers.” They are simply your average marksman who wants to improve. Show me any athlete who does not.

I am not sure how the media got this idea that there is some vast culture of people out there who consider themselves snipers. Being America, people spend money on any number of things and in the shooting community, that can be precision rifles or classes on how to effectively use them. I even know of an organization that competes with old Civil War rifles because their interest in history brings them to the conclusion that they want to test themselves with those old smoke poles. But none of these people fool themselves into thinking they are real snipers.

A sniper in this country is either a law enforcement officer trained and tasked with ending hostage situations or a military person tasked with depriving the enemy freedom of action. In both cases these people save far more lives then they ever take in action. The idea that there is a “sniper culture” out there would be humorous if not so misused by the media. They currently are trying to paint this image of a bunch of wackos running around the country because, I suppose, it makes for good TV or print. The simple fact is, you are not a sniper unless you belong to one of the two categories listed above. And if you take the training via any number of schools out there, it still does not make you a real sniper, qualified and duty slotted to the job.

After Sept. 11 many American Muslims and Arab-Americans felt they were tarred with guilt by association with the al-Qaida terrorists. Have sniper enthusiasts and professionals experienced something similar?

It’s been hectic. We created and maintained the site as a way to educate the public about the misunderstood and often very hard role the military or police sniper has to perform in the course of his duties. Often hated by both the enemy and even his own troops, snipers have long been portrayed as either supermen or murderers when in actuality these hard-charging individuals have saved many lives through their actions. It was not until the late 1960s that our military finally got it and made a serious effort to keep a fully trained cadre of individuals available for time of war. Our site started out as a way to give these folks, and the increasing number of police tasked as sharpshooters, a place to meet and talk. It grew into a place for them to go to read about new products of interest to the community. It then exploded into a site where anyone with an interest in history could go to learn more about the subject or learn to improve their own skills at long-range shooting, which, if I am not mistaken, is still considered an honorable sport in every circle other than with the anti-gun organizations and a few misguided editorial writers in the media. If you’ve ever taken the time to visit a High Power match or Tactical match, you’d see that the individuals there are very normal (police, soldiers, former soldiers, lawyers, doctors, welders, pilots, trash collectors, store clerks, you name it), but like any athlete, very serious about their sport and winning. The idea that these folks are to be looked upon as a subculture of death or some other media-derived sound bite is laughable.

What you have in D.C. is a serial killer and nothing more. The skills he has shown have nothing to do with sniping. In fact any nut with a gun and the will to misuse it could do what he or she is currently doing. To call them anything other than what they are, serial killers, does a disservice to the many dedicated marksmen who have accepted the call to defend the country using their unique skills.

The funny thing is that the site has, to our surprise, given both military and police personnel a place to learn. You may be surprised to know that most competitive shooters are far more knowledgeable about long-range shooting than either the military or the police (it’s interesting that so many people can shoot at really long ranges and yet except for this nut in D.C., you never hear about it. That should tell the media something: Real shooters are honest and honorable citizens and nothing more). Often our site is thanked by individuals in both the military and law enforcement because they have been able to come to the site and learn something new that they were not aware of. The difference is that civilian shooters have the budget to play with new gear whereas most law enforcement types are limited to only what their department can afford, which is usually next to nothing. Often these sharpshooters come to our site to learn what the civilian competitors use … a Test and Evaluation as it were, because it saves them from making a mistake in purchasing the wrong gear.

Media attention to the sniper subculture has grown rapidly over the last several days. Can you tell us about the crash of attention?

I am actually quite burned out on this thing and do not really wish to be tied in with what is going on in D.C. It’s akin to the media coming down on a magazine dedicated to car racing because over 50,000 people die each year as a result of reading their product. Our site is a source of information and history. It is not responsible or tied in any way with cult groups or serial killers. So in short, I probably have nothing to really offer as I cannot imagine what would drive a person to commit the acts being perpetrated in the D.C. area. I am willing to answer questions via e-mail if the tone is not the one being set by the likes of the NBC “Today” show or the N.Y. Daily News, but to be honest, if I get one more phone call on the topic I think the thing is coming down off the wall. It was that bad the other day!

Early on, it looked like it would be a turbulent weekend. Friday morning, D.C. Metro police arrested 649 demonstrators in a series of nonpermitted marches in downtown Washington. That startling number was larger than the total arrested in the massive and highly publicized protests in Seattle in 1999. But novel police tactics really accounted for the sizable haul. In massive numbers, police coaxed protesters into what amounted to carefully constructed traps, with walls of police officers in riot gear on three sides. Once the police corralled the protesters into the trap, a fourth wall of riot-gear-clad police would swing the door shut. From that point, hapless demonstrators were trapped, and the police arrested them at their leisure.

The main event began at noon Saturday on a grassy hillside at the foot of the Washington Monument, where a few thousand protesters gathered for three hours of speeches, music and preparations for a march several blocks uptown later in the afternoon. Near one side, a group called the Eco-Bloc was busily putting the finishing touches on a massive cardboard and burlap Trojan Horse representing “World Bank Aid,” festooning it with signs for Citibank and Halliburton and various other titans of global finance. Onstage, anti-globalization bands took turns playing, Michelle Shocked performed and speakers, such as headliner Ralph Nader, took turns riling the crowd on a variety of loosely stitched together issues and themes.

At any anti-globalization protest, it’s difficult to look beyond the clichés. There’s the very white college student with the “Kill Whitey” patch sown onto his army fatigues; a seemingly endless number of people handing out copies of the black-and-red-splashed Socialist Worker – which, in case you didn’t know, bears a striking resemblance to the New York Post — and placards with messages like “U.S. Imperialist Butchers, Hands Off Iraq!” Strip out the signs and placards and you could have very easily mistaken the proceedings for a Grateful Dead concert from earlier decades.

Between music acts and speakers, the organizers of the day’s events ginned up the crowd with call-and-response slogans: “More world/ less bank,” “They say privatize/ We say democratize” and so on. And the excitement for the day was supposed to take place after the march when autonomous “affinity groups” would try to “quarantine” or, in other words, surround, the International Monetary Fund building a few blocks from the White House. At around 1:30 p.m. an event organizer told me the quarantine would probably be pushed back until at least 5 or 6 p.m. There were so many groups who wanted to speak, with so many different demands and agendas, that the rally on the Mall was running much later than expected. With more time on my hands I decided to find out what the deal was with the bandannas.

The first few bandanna-clad men I approached refused to talk to me. Justin, a 21-year-old college student who had driven to D.C. with 18 classmates from Austin, Texas, said the bandannas were partly to hide your identity, but also to show solidarity with the larger community of protesters as well as the individual affinity group. I pointed to a member of the United States Park Police standing at the edge of crowd videotaping and asked if that was what they were worried about. It was. But the bandannas weren’t as effective as they once were. The government, Justin told me with some urgency, has secret technology to identify you just by photographing your eyes.

I asked him Justin if he’d been at any of the protests the day before, and it turns out he had just missed getting arrested early Friday morning in a downtown “snake march” — a free-form, nonpermitted march through city streets in which protesters go for as long as they can before they get caught by the police. Justin’s group had gotten snagged, but just as he was about to be arrested, a police officer on the line offered a handful of protesters the chance to leave if they made a run for it. He slipped through that noose, but did get arrested at the big roundup at Freedom Plaza a couple of hours later.

For those arrested in D.C. on Friday, the rest of the day meant sitting in a police bus through the morning and the early afternoon with their hands cuffed with the plastic straps police reserve for mass demonstrations. Then, they spent nine or 10 more hours at a processing center with one wrist tied to an opposing ankle. The arrestees from Friday morning I talked to had all gotten out around midnight or 1 a.m. on Saturday.

I was trying to figure out more about the planned quarantine of the IMF building later in the afternoon, and I asked Justin if he was going to take part. He didn’t seem enthusiastic. A police officer had knocked him on the back of the head with a baton on Friday morning, he said. He leaned over and pointed to the spot on his head, offering me a chance to feel the proof for myself. I rubbed my paw over the backside of his scalp. I couldn’t feel anything, though I don’t doubt he’d taken a whack. Being arrested once seemed to be enough for Justin. But the bigger reason for not participating was more mundane: He didn’t want to risk getting arrested again because his group needed to hit the road Saturday night to get back to Texas in time for Monday classes.

At about 3 p.m., the crowd marched several blocks to Farragut Square at the corner of K Street and Connecticut Avenue. At the new venue, a white United Rentals truck was the stage for the familiar mix of political speeches and folky, anti-globalization ballads. “Coke is the drink of the despots” ran the refrain to one song. Or was it “death squads”? I kept straining to make it out every time the singer warbled it, but I couldn’t quite be sure. (A check on the Web on Sunday revealed the answer: It was “death squads.”) In between singers and speakers, event organizers gave the crowd occasional updates on their negotiations with police to allow the march to move on to the vicinity of the IMF building for the attempted quarantine.

Really, though, the fix was already in. What stood out at the Farragut Square rally wasn’t the protesters but the police. City officials had thoroughly contained the demonstration inside the park with a dense band of police officers. If you were an onlooker outside the police ring you could not get in, and if you were a protester inside it you could not get out.

At about 5:45 p.m. the crowd began to stream out of Farragut Square down I Street, pushing a scattering of press photographers and scribbling reporters in their wake. And as might have been expected, the protesters were being marched into a trap. At the corner of 18th and I streets, rows of riot-gear-clad police officers three to four thick blocked the ways north and west. Media reports widely noted the massive police presence, which effectively threw a big wet blanket over the weekend protests. But seeing it up close was something. The D.C. police wore segmented body armor that included thigh guards, shin guards, feet guards, forearm guards, upper arm guards, shoulder guards, thick torso guards, visored helmets and neck guards. The look was very “Robocop,” or like some sort of black-plated lobster.

Whatever they looked like, they didn’t look like anything you’d want to walk into, and the marchers happily marched down 18th Street into the pen the police had prepared for them. A few minutes later there was a brief backward rush of demonstrators suddenly afraid they were about to be trapped again and arrested as hundreds had been in the illegal marches on Friday morning. But they missed the point: Even if the police had been entitled to make mass arrests as they had the previous morning, they probably wouldn’t have tried. The police presence was so strong and the demonstrators’ so feeble, the police just didn’t care. They held their ground and waited for the protesters to get tired and go home. No one ever got to the IMF headquarters.

So where was everybody?

Well, there’s the uncomfortable but undeniable fact that, as the world changed post-9/11, so did the attractiveness of the anti-globalization movement. Suddenly, there was a more well-known rival criticizing the West for its laissez-faire economics, its secular commercial culture and its military power: radical Islam. Sure, there’s no moral equivalence between the two. But even the most earnest protester (i.e., not the kid with the “kill Whitey” patch) realizes that the anti-globalization movement now shares the stage with that other global opposition movement decrying American hegemony. And today that ugly and far more lethal contender for the stage seems more potent and relevant to almost everything that is happening in the world today.

Despite the demonstrators’ unruly ways and scattershot claims, some of their most specific demands are reasonable and increasingly popular: the demand for debt relief for the poorest nations and for greater transparency and openness in IMF and World Bank meetings. Indeed, many mainstream economists and political commentators now echo the protesters’ claims that the often draconian austerity measures the IMF demands from developing countries as the price of loan bailouts are not only ruinous to vast numbers of people but simply counterproductive and misguided. On each of these points, over the last half-dozen years, international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have begun to reform. And certainly some of that movement is attributable to the voluble and insistent demands from protesters like the ones who descended on Washington over the weekend. So, perhaps, they have a little less to protest than a few years ago.

Some expected that the coming war would have provided more energy to the movement. But instead, seeing the fairly uninspired crowds that turned up, it’s probably safe to assume the opposite happened — that the likely war against Iraq had stolen the attention of people normally sympathetic to these issues. In fact, with larger antiwar protests planned for October in Washington, you can’t help but assume a number of college students are saving their energy, and money, for a later day.

Not that there wasn’t opposition to war with Iraq. Speakers denounced it, as did hundreds of handmade signs and placards. But it didn’t dominate the events as one might have expected given the atmosphere in Washington, the United Nations and to varying degrees throughout the country.

Here, though, it was just another line item along with debt relief, the environment, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the IMF, the World Bank and water privatization. On Sunday, protesters did converge on Dupont Circle for an anti-Iraq war rally, where they heard speakers and watched antiwar improvisational theater before marching up Connecticut Avenue to the official residence of Vice President Dick Cheney for a final antiwar sendoff. But on Sunday, the atmosphere was almost entirely different from the day before. The crowd was laid back and the police were even more so.

After the march toward the IMF petered out on Saturday evening, I wandered back to Farragut Square where the protesters had been chanting and protesting an hour before. When I got there what struck me most was how clean it was. There seemed to be less trash left behind than there would be on an average weekday. That was fitting for a group so consciously pure in its advocacy of environmental causes and not despoiling the planet. But it was an impressive display of discipline and responsibility nonetheless. Hours later, though, I wondered if the meaning wasn’t a different one: Like the protests themselves, the crowd had loudly come and gone without leaving much of a lasting trace.

After weeks of saber rattling by administration hawks led to widespread speculation that the United States was prepared to launch an invasion even without U.N. sanction, President Bush’s speech before the world body last Wednesday decisively recast the Iraq debate, swelling the president’s support at home and getting erstwhile allies like Russia and France — who opposed American unilateralism — to start pressuring Iraq to readmit inspectors or else.

The speech was rightly hailed as a triumph for the president. But much less attention was given to the change of policy that brought that shift in debate or its implications.

For months, White House policy has been regime change, pure and simple. For all its Cheney-ite bluster, the president’s speech at the U.N. shifted the policy and debate to Iraqi compliance with a panoply of U.N. resolutions. That was a key victory for the policy favored by Colin Powell, and America’s allies reacted accordingly. But Saddam’s rapid decision to call the president’s bluff exposed the consequences of the president’s policy change — not pleasant ones for administration hard-liners.

No one believes Saddam has had a true change of heart about inspections and weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, he’ll take every chance he can get to evade or obstruct the truly invasive inspections that could denude him of his WMD arsenal. But until he does so — until he stiffs the inspectors and gives the U.S. the pretext to attack — the administration has little real choice but to go along with the process taking shape at the U.N., the one the president himself called for. Yesterday the president told reporters: “It’s [Saddam's] latest ploy, his latest attempt not to be held accountable for defying the United Nations.” No doubt it is a ploy, or at least a play for time. It would be different if the president had gone to the U.N. and said, “Time’s up. Saddam never complied with the Gulf War resolutions. Now we’re going to invade. Anyone who wants to join us is welcome to come along.” But he didn’t. He dared the U.N. to redeem itself by forcing Saddam to comply with its resolutions. Having said that, he has little choice but to let the U.N. try to force Saddam to make good on his pledge or see if he’ll try to wriggle out of it. And, as many hawks are now beginning to realize, that could take months or even years. If Democrats now seem less skittish about giving the president a vote, it’s likely because he now seems locked into a policy tied to the U.N. and one that might drag on for some time.

Some administration supporters insist that the president has simply gone too far out on the limb to walk back. “We’ve reached a point of no return,” says one D.C. Iraq-hawk in close touch with regime-change supporters in and out of the administration. “The rhetoric was just too high the last two weeks. It’s like ‘No New Taxes.’”

But the rapid turn of events has left most ardent supporters of regime change in the press floundering in a mix of disingenuousness and denial, unable to come to grips with the implications of the president’s policy or the changed state of the debate either at home or abroad. The turn of events has left some of the White House’s most fulsome advocates in the press busily eating words that they wrote only a week before. Last week Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes predicted the president would take the “gamble” of daring Saddam to readmit inspectors, a choice Barnes believed Saddam either could not or would not do. If he did he would “quickly lose control of his own government and fall from power,” Barnes wrote. Today Barnes seemed to have forgotten everything he’d written just days ago. Now he doesn’t think the president was taking a gamble at all. Saddam’s “disingenuous offer of a return to unconditional arms inspections” changed nothing, Barnes now writes, and only demonstrates that Saddam is “doomed.”

Barnes’ boss at the Weekly Standard, influential regime change advocate William Kristol, takes a longer, more nuanced view. “At the end of the day,” Kristol told Salon on Tuesday, “Saddam can’t live with an inspections regime that would deprive him of his weapons of mass destruction. Bush can’t live with Saddam with weapons of mass destruction. So I think we’re on course to regime change.” (Like many of the key hawks, Kristol believes that Saddam sees his WMD as literally the basis of his power, both in terms of his prestige inside and outside the country and his regional power aspirations. In the hawks’ view, asking Saddam to give up his WMD is basically tantamount to asking him to relinquish power.)

But the argument that Saddam’s obsession with keeping his WMD will precipitate war in the short term, rather than the long, runs up against certain key elements of the hawks’ own reasoning and, to some degree, simple logic. If Clinton was never serious about overthrowing Saddam and if Bush really is deadly serious about overthrowing Saddam’s government — and Saddam knows that — that gives him a level of incentive to comply he’s never had before. Certainly, Iraq will haggle over details. And if Bush lets up the pressure, Saddam will welsh on his new commitment. But as long as Bush doesn’t let up the pressure, Saddam seems likely to comply just enough to avoid giving the United States any pretext to attack. If that happens, much of the momentum for war built up over the summer could dissipate, as 9/11 recedes further. The inspections game could drag on for a year or more. And that thought makes regime-changers see red like nothing else.

To avoid that outcome, regime change supporters have rallied around a more audacious effort: rewriting the president’s speech after the fact. That is, maybe the president said that the issue was making Saddam live up to the resolutions, but in fact whether he does or not is really beside the point, because the real point is that Saddam can’t be trusted and must be ousted. Gary Schmitt, executive director of the hawkish Project for the New American Century, argues with remarkable frankness that the president’s speech only conditionally accepted the legitimacy of the U.N. “In some ways,” says Schmitt, “you’re saying it’s a legitimate body for making legitimate decisions. On the other hand you’re saying it’s legitimate to the extent that it accomplishes the goals that the institution was supposed to address.” In other words, Saddam is an outlaw who has forfeited the protection of the U.N., and whether or not he superficially complies with its rules now is irrelevant: It must sign off on his removal, or itself become irrelevant.

Schmitt, for his part, isn’t even sure the administration will even let inspectors get into Iraq before trying to force a change in the terms of the argument. “At some point,” says Schmitt, “they’ve got to come out and make the argument that the kind of inspections that Saddam may be agreeing to are just not satisfactory. I don’t think they can sustain their position unless they start making the argument that UNSCOM-lite isn’t going to get the job done and in fact it’s going to make matters worse. It requires making further arguments and beating the drums along those lines.” The letter of the president’s speech was resolutions, the regime-changers now say, but its spirit was regime change. And the spirit of the speech is what counts.

But this reasoning seems to partake heavily of wishful thinking. It assumes the president, after making the U.N.’s resolutions the issue, can suddenly pull an about-face and simply invade Iraq. But that seems highly implausible. He would immediately squander all the internationalist goodwill at home and abroad that he gained from his U.N. speech: indeed, such an action would arguably take relations between the U.S. and the international community to their nadir. If the president truly felt able to call his own shots and define the terms of the coming world debate entirely to his liking he wouldn’t have needed to go to the U.N. at all. Clearly he felt the need to enlist the support, or at least acquiescence, from countries like France and Russia and the Arab states that he seemed to have in hand late last week. Having put his cards on the table last week, can he really pick them up and deal himself a new hand?

The president still has plenty of room to up the ante on Saddam. After UNSCOM inspectors were booted out of Iraq in 1998, the U.N. replaced UNSCOM with a new agency, UNMOVIC. The inspections called for by UNMOVIC are much looser than the old ones. And the president should and no doubt will insist that any new inspections be at least as tough as the old ones. The administration can also insist on a new resolution authorizing force if and when Saddam reneges on his pledge. But it will still be up to Iraq and other Security Council members to decide if and when to say no, if and when to give the president his pretext to let the bombs drop. If the president really isn’t serious about trying to enforce the resolutions, then his ultimatum to Saddam and his challenge to the U.N. doesn’t really work. It may make sense to other Iraq-hawks in Washington. It may even be the right policy. But it won’t fly with the other allies who took the president at his word when he seemed to signal a willingness to work through the U.N.

Rather desperately, some Iraq hawks are arguing that inspectors are only one of the conditions the president laid down. At the U.N. the president demanded Iraqi compliance with a raft of U.N. resolutions requiring, among other things, an accounting of Gulf War POWs, monetary reparations to Kuwait, and an end to political repression inside Iraq. That laundry list of demands was so long, and it was so unlikely that Iraq would comply with it, that the White House would always be left with some example of unfulfilled U.N. requirements to justify war. But within days of the speech it was clear that this reasoning was too clever by half. None of the countries at the U.N. are going to be goaded into backing war against Iraq because it hadn’t accounted for some Qatari POWs who probably died a dozen years ago.

Some Iraq hawks are now privately grousing that the difficulties the administration finds itself in prove that Bush should never have gone to the U.N. Others maintain that in the real world, as opposed to the hermetic universe of right-wing think tanks, the administration really had no choice. It’s a debate that mimics the internal ones that have been roiling the administration all summer.

One prominent conservative says that the Iraq hawks overlooked a key element in gathering support for any war: a dramatic precipitating event. Danielle Pletka was a much loved and much hated street-fighter in the D.C. Iraq wars of the late 1990s. She’s an ardent regime-changer who served until recently as Jesse Helms’ chief advisor on Middle East policy. “This is a little bit outside the orthodoxy of the grand ‘regime change’ crowd,” says Pletka, who is now a fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, “but one of the main things lacking in the regime change program was always the ‘why.’” By the “why,” Pletka doesn’t mean that the hawks haven’t made the case that Saddam’s a bad guy or, in her opinion, that the U.S. is justified in overthrowing his government. She means that the Iraq hawks never quite hashed out the immediate rationale for invading.

“To go into Iraq like that without providing some sort of trigger would have proven more difficult than many have envisioned,” she told Salon on Tuesday. “When it comes down to actually going in and invading a country and deposing a leader — for whatever good reason — when push comes to shove, figuring out how you get your foot in the front door is not as easy as people think. This isn’t a Nike commercial. We can’t ‘just do it.’ For people on the outside, it’s always easy to say this is the policy. It’s gotta happen. Let’s go. No problem. But I think the international reality is much more complicated than that.”

“The question,” says Pletka, “is whether the administration is deft enough to deal with the obstacles which Iraq with the help of its friends on the Security Council is going to throw in our way.”

Pletka believes the administration is up to that task, but that it will take time. But others see an administration boxed in, with no clear path to the goal its most ardent hawks cherish.

Rhode told Al-Jubeir that once the new administration got its affairs in order there’d be no more pussyfooting around as there was in the Clinton days, according to a source familiar with the meeting. The United States would take care of Saddam, start calling the shots in the region, and the Saudis would have to fall in line. Al-Jubeir demurred. These were issues the two allies would certainly discuss, Al-Jubeir told the American.

Rhode then shoved his finger in the diminutive Saudi’s chest and told him, “You’re not going to have any choice!”

Rhode’s antics caused a brief frenzy on the phone lines connecting the Pentagon, the State Department and the Saudi Embassy. And the embarrassing incident may have cost Rhode a high-level appointment in the Pentagon’s Near East and South Asian Affairs office. But the incident — among others — set the tone for the Bush administration’s relations with the Saudis, which were deeply troubled well before Sept. 11, when more than a dozen Saudi nationals drove planes into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. After the Washington Post reported earlier this week that a Pentagon advisory board listened to a speaker (and a peculiar one one at that) describe Saudi Arabia as America’s enemy, suggesting military action against the desert kingdom, Pentagon officials were quick to insist that such views were by no means those of the Pentagon or the Bush administration.

But the touchiness of the response and the delicacy of the issue underscores a reality that the Saudis and high-level administration officials well understand: Many, perhaps most, of the Bush administration appointees at the Pentagon today are only slightly less hostile to the Saudis — and many of America’s other traditional Arab allies — than the speaker at the briefing.

And it spotlights an unsettling problem among the men deciding whether we should wage war: The relationship between career military officers and their civilian bosses at the Pentagon are the worst they’ve been, some insiders say, in more than 20 years, even more divisive than they were during the Clinton years. There is no clear resolution to it, and particularly in the near future, the rift could have dangerous consequences.

The Bush administration’s most right-leaning political appointees are concentrated at the Pentagon. And nowhere is that tilt more evident than in its Middle East policies. The Bush appointees have not just ignored recommendations from military advisors and civil servants but have often ousted or sidelined those who have had the temerity to offer any policy advice. Over the last 18 months, there has been an exodus of career civil servants leaving the Pentagon policy shop for stints on Capitol Hill or with other Defense Department-affiliated institutions, according to a half-dozen such departees who spoke to Salon — far more than is normally the case when administrations change from one party to the other. Many of those slots have been filled by ideologues and think-tank denizens who can be relied on to serve up the right kind of advice to their superiors.

When most people think of neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, they think of men like Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board — the panel that heard the anti-Saudi briefing. But the second tier of civilian appointees at the Pentagon is stacked with Wolfowitz and Perle protégés who are in many ways even more conservative in their views than their mentors and — as the Rhode incident shows — a good deal more hotheaded. And even Wolfowitz strikes many in the military as more than a touch conservative. “Wolfowitz is a right-wing sucker,” says retired Army colonel William Taylor, a defense policy analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “He’s a good guy, a smart guy. But he’s to the right of Genghis Khan.”

In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East — Turkey, Iraq and Iran — democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn’t be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They’d be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.

As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon — indeed most establishment foreign policy experts — see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush’s hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn’t Baghdad, it’s Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.

In his new book, “Supreme Command,” Johns Hopkins University professor Eliot Cohen argues that the best wartime civilian leaders are those who don’t take the generals’ word for it. They prod and question and they don’t hesitate to overrule their chiefs when their advice doesn’t square either with common sense or the larger political or geopolitical logic. Cohen’s thesis got some confirmation in last fall’s Afghan war; after Sept. 11, the Joint Chiefs wanted to delay an attack on Afghanistan to await favorable weather conditions and gain time to position extensive assets in the region.

The U.S. Central Command, responsible for Central Asia and the Middle East “wanted very much to wait until the spring to start the operation,” says one defense policy analyst in close touch with military and civilian Defense Department officials. “The civilians just said ‘No. We want to start in October. We can’t let 30 days pass since Sept. 11.’” And, in retrospect, few foreign policy experts would disagree that that was the right course. “I don’t think there’s any question,” says one Clinton Pentagon official, “that Enduring Freedom was fought differently because [Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] was in there prodding, saying, ‘General, that’s not creative enough. General, you’re not giving me the options I want.’ I have no doubt that Rumsfeld was personally responsible for the fact that Special Operations forces were introduced early into Afghanistan.”

But Afghanistan was one case. And while nearly everyone agrees — in theory at least — that civilians should prod the chiefs for better answers and question their preferred options, there’s a fine line between a willingness to overrule military advice and an unwillingness to listen to it at all. And on the peace process, Saudi Arabia and — most pressingly — Iraq, Bush Pentagon appointees are increasingly opting for the latter course.

One staff officer who worked under and briefed high-level officials in both administrations describes one administration easily cowed by generals’ sober descriptions of the dangers of a military engagement in a country like Iraq and another administration virtually indifferent to them. When discussing a major move like an invasion of Iraq, says this retired officer, “you have to look [a civilian defense appointee] in the eye and say, ‘Sir, do you understand that you cannot control the outcome of the enterprise on which we are about to engage?’ If he moves his head up and down to that, then you can ask him the second question.

“In the Clinton administration, they’d look at you with that bovine stare. And then their head would start moving laterally,” the retired officer said. “But these guys seem to have assumed away that problem. They seem to believe they can control the outcome. Every man in uniform knows that’s not true.”

Now, many on each side are viewing the other through a prism of caricatures and clichés. The uniformed officers and civil servants tend to espouse establishmentarian views of proper U.S. defense policy in the Middle East and the operational details of how to fight actual wars. They see the difficulties and problems in relations with countries like Saudi Arabia but are more interested in bettering relations with those regimes than ousting them from power. These career professionals see the civilian appointees as uninformed zealots who’ve spent most of their time in think-tanks and have no actual military experience. The civilians tend to see the generals they command as unimaginative bureaucrats who lack the will to actually fight.

This split is also heating up over what defense policymakers call “transformation” or the “revolution in military affairs” — a host of budgetary, structural and weaponry decisions aimed at revolutionizing the American military to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

The big push for transformation comes from Rumsfeld (and not Wolfowitz and Co., who focus more on regional policy) and the tight circles of his advisors and aides. Most prominent among them is Stephen A. Cambone, Rumsfeld’s chief deputy, who earlier served as the staff director of the Rumsfeld Commission on National Missile Defense. Cambone has earned the fierce enmity of almost every officer at the Pentagon for chewing out generals while remaining unassailable since he has his boss’s complete confidence.

Many defense analysts doubt Rumsfeld has a coherent vision of transformation but most believe that his aggressive stance on the issue — signaled most prominently by the high-profile axing of the Army’s new, but costly and unwieldy, Crusader artillery system — is a positive development. In the complex calculus of civilian military oversight, there are few issues that the military is less capable of addressing on its own than the sort of broad, sweeping changes implied by transformation. Making revolutionary changes to the armed forces necessarily means ditching weapons and ways of operating that the heads of the services have built their careers around.

“It’s more than human nature can deliver,” says defense expert Edward Luttwak, to expect Army generals who built careers around artillery to turn around and scrap a new artillery system like Crusader. Similarly, can one really expect the top Air Force generals — most of whom were fighter pilots — to back taking money out of fighter jet production so that it can be reallocated for more bombers and unmanned drones? Arrogance and bad manners from Rumsfeld and Cambone may have complicated matters, but transformation requires hard choices that simply cannot be sweet-talked away.

But the mix of the antagonism over regional defense policy — particularly in the Middle East — and the transformation debate has produced a level of antagonism between civilians and military at the Pentagon that is actually far greater than it was under Bill Clinton. And no one is more surprised than the military itself.

“By the time the Clinton era was ending, a lot of the military guys still held the view that we really don’t like Clinton, and boy, if we got a Republican in here, it would be oh happy day and we could really ramp up the budget and go to town,” says one former career officer who remains in close touch with members of Joint Staff. Only it didn’t turn out that way. “They throw their lot in with the Republicans. The Republicans come to office. And wham! They’re worse off than they were at the end of Clinton. Even though they’re going to get more money in the budget, they’re going to have little or no say-so over where it goes or how it’s done. The relationship between them and the new overseers is testy at best. It’s very strained.”

The rude awakening the armed services got in February 2001 points up a too little appreciated fact about the Clinton Pentagon. As a group, the American military never lost its distrust and even enmity toward Bill Clinton. And they are far more positively inclined toward George W. Bush. But in terms of calling their own shots, the brass never had it so good as it did under the former president — particularly after Clinton’s first couple of years. Clinton-era defense officials were seldom in a position to go head to head with the generals on truly important matters, with some simply lacking confidence in their grasp of military affairs. Because of that they were often ready to defer to those in uniform.

Others at the Clinton Pentagon were seasoned defense professionals — men like Defense Secretary William Perry and Undersecretary Walt Slocum — who had as deep a grasp of military affairs as anyone who has ever served in their posts. But they still operated in the larger knowledge that their civilian superiors lacked the political clout to back them up in a major confrontation with the military. Out of necessity, defense officials reached a modus vivendi with the military, and the two sides ran the Pentagon by consensus.

Despite the lip service he paid to “transformation” on the campaign trail, what the military expected from George W. was Bush redux: more or less unquestioning support for the armed forces. But they soon learned that Rumsfeld and his new team had taken a very different lesson from the often fractious relationship between the military and the outgoing administration. While Rumsfeld and Co. were no less sour on Clinton defense policies, they also believed that the civilians needed to bring the military to heel. “They thought the uniformed military had run roughshod over the process at the Pentagon,” explains one retired Marine with long service at the Pentagon. “They thought the civilians really needed to take over, and that attitude became very evident in the first couple of weeks.”

Though major defense cuts began under the first Bush administration, the political tenor of Bush I was almost perfectly suited to the officer corps: culturally pro-military and ideologically middle-of-the-road conservative. The ideologues who populated the Reagan Pentagon were occasionally irksome to the Joint Staff. But they were united by a common goal: their opposition to the Soviet Union. And given the historical moment — the arms buildup that hiked funding for numerous weapons programs while seldom cutting any — latent ideological tensions seldom came to the fore.

By contrast, Bush II, though also willing to spend, is far more ideologically conservative and doesn’t share the reluctance that earlier Republican administrations had at scrapping weapons programs. Most important, these appointees have the political clout and the willingness to fight with the military to get their way, and have been, in their own way, beneficiaries of the historical moment — the successful prosecution of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. The new team turns out to be as likely to dismiss professional military advice as the old team was to accept it. And that accounts for the case of whiplash that the Pentagon brass has suffered for the last 18 months.

What makes civilian control so important is that military officers have a tendency to become consummate ideologues, too — not of a political ideology but a corporate one, the ideology of the professional military. They’re reared in the culture of their service branch, build careers around war-fighting doctrines that are often outdated by the time they become heads of their services. They have an understandable tendency toward risk aversion and an equal tendency to conflate the interests of their services with those of the country. Civilians bring a fresh set of eyes to the problems of fighting wars. They tend, in short, not to be blinkered by preconceived notions and intellectual rigidity.

But if the civilians themselves are hidebound ideologues, then much of the benefit of strong civilian control is lost. It’s just the blind leading the blind. And in Iraq that could get us into a heap of trouble.