By Gwynne Dyer, ContributorIT GETS quite warm in Iraq between May and September, and the last conqueror of Baghdad, General Sir Stanley Maude, avoided the worst of the Mesopotamian summer by leading his British and Indian troops into the city in March of 1917.
However, the Arab warriors who beat the Persian army and seized the country for Islam at the battle of Qadisiyah in 637 did their fighting in June. Over two thousand years before that, the army of King Hammurabi of Babylon fought in every season and unlike the current generation of US Army tanks, his chariots didn't even have air-conditioning.
The whole business about a February or March deadline for attacking Iraq because of the fierce Iraqi summer has worked up by the press. No such deadline exists, and the US army can attack Baghdad in any month of the year. Which is just as well if President Bush is serious about killing the man who "tried to kill my dad", because the schedule for a US attack is now slipping visibly. The problem is not getting the troops into place, but getting all the other ducks lined up facing in the same direction.
Three major issues have to be cleared up before Bush orders the attack to begin, and the hardest to control is the position of America's own allies. Every opinion poll shows that the American public will back Bush's war if at least a couple of major allies come along, but gets cold feet if the United States has to do it alone. (The support for a war also drops below 50 per cent if the poll-takers suggest that even one American soldier will be killed, but that's another story).
It's as though the US public needs at least one friendly foreign country to confirm Bush's allegations about the need to destroy Saddam Hussein by showing up for the war.
This gives British Prime Minister Tony Blair quite a bit of leverage, for Britain is the only ally that would be likely to provide significant numbers of troops. Recently Blair has been using this leverage by saying that the arms inspectors' report to the United Nations Security Council on January 27 on their findings in Iraq over the first 60 days is no kind of deadline, and that Britain expects the process to continue for some considerable time after that. He hasn't explicitly said that Britain would not go to war without a second UN resolution authorising an attack on Iraq, but he hasn't said it would either.
If the allies won't go without another UN resolution, what are the chances of getting one soon? Not good, for no amount of threats and bribes will get the other Security Council members to vote for war without at least some hard evidence that Saddam Hussein is concealing weapons of mass destruction.
That has not happened yet, and chief weapons inspector Hans Blix is refusing to be rushed: "There is no way we are going by the time-line of any administration, be it the American or any other," he said on January 18.
Then there is the domestic political problem. Karl Rove, Bush's chief political adviser, would not be doing his job if he were not warning the president that a February war could mean he peaks too soon, just like his father did. Bush senior launched his ground attack in February 1991, won his war in March - and lost the election 19 months later because by that time the glow of victory had faded while the economy was still down. Wouldn't it be better, Rove will be asking, to have the victory a bit closer to the November, 2004 election?
And then there's the distraction of North Korea, and the difficulty with getting either Turkey or Saudi Arabia to commit firmly to letting the US use their territory for the attack on Iraq, and the probability that Saddam will seize foreign hostages again (maybe including the arms inspectors) if a US invasion looks imminent, and the sheer, foot-dragging reluctance of the US Army to come up with any plan that might involve its soldiers in street-fighting in Baghdad...
President Bush will almost certainly get his war in the end, one way or another, but next month is looking less and less likely.
