It’s Saturday, do you know where your military is?

John Pra­dos over at Tom​Paine​.com makes an inter­est­ing argu­ment that Team Bush will start a war sooner rather than later in order to sim­ply shuck off the diplo­matic restraints the U.N. Secu­rity Coun­cil has begun to draw tighter around the United States. And while Hans Blix’s mixed report to the Secu­rity Coun­cil today ral­lies mar­kets as the threat of war sup­pos­edly recedes, the White House must surely be gnash­ing its col­lec­tive teeth. Let’s see about con­nect­ing the dots, as they like to say in the White House:

1. Spe­cial forces are already oper­at­ing in Iraq and have been for some time.
2. With the esca­la­tion of Threat­Con to “orange,” the pub­lic is “ready” for a retal­ia­tory attacks from ter­ror groups.
3. With that in mind, it’s a long week­end, and many peo­ple have left cities for vaca­tion. (I know sev­eral of my friends have done so.) It’s also a slow news cycle on Sat­ur­day, so the White House might be able to get some trac­tion before CNN et al. get their game on.
4. The Hajj, the Mus­lim pil­grim­age ended yesterday.
5. Gen. Tommy Franks, the the­ater com­man­der, is en route to Qatar.

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p>Do these add up to war? I’m inclined to say no. While there are a lot of forces in the region, they are not yet at full strength, despite the full deploy­ment the 3^rd Infantry Divi­sion. The 101^st is not yet there, with heli­copters and gun­ships still being loaded in Jack­sonville, Fla. (Granted, the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion pre-positioned a lot of equip­ment in the region through­out the 1990s to avoid a Desert Shield-style buildup, but there still remains a lot of heavy-lifting to do. An irony of this war is that for all the scorn heaped upon the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion by the Bushies, they will fight this war and win it with Clinton’s mil­i­tary, the one that was appar­ently neglected for 8 years.)
Also, the U.N. is still talk­ing. While Bush said he would not be bound by “unpro­duc­tive debate” (“The United States has agreed to dis­cuss any mate­r­ial breach with the Secu­rity Coun­cil, but with­out jeop­ar­diz­ing our free­dom of action to defend our coun­try,” Bush said in his Rose Gar­den com­ments on Nov. 8, 2002), I’m bet­ting this was more blus­ter than pol­icy. The United States, through its ham-fisted han­dling of the Secu­rity Coun­cil and NATO, has iso­lated itself in the world, with the excep­tion of Britain and the new NATO coun­tries. Per­haps my naïvité is show­ing, but I don’t think even the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz Axis of Incom­pe­tence is so mad as to launch a war while the Secu­rity Coun­cil hasn’t even begun debate on Blix’s report yet.
Will they?

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