THIS IS NOT THE TIME TO WOBBLE

Mark Steyn says Donald Rumsfeld's talk of a

deal with Saddam is dispiriting, but believes the phoney war is coming to an end

New Hampshire LAST weekend was going pretty swimmingly for me. All over the TV, the news shows reported on the 'peace' demonstrations 'sweeping' America, though you couldn't help noticing the cameras always stayed in tight, no wide shots, just closeups — in some cases, because there were only six 'peace' lovers present: in others, to avoid showing the vast numbers of nutters.

In Washington, where the pro-Pol Pot, pro-Tiananmen bloodbath Stalinists of ANSWER were running things, the off-thegraph leftism tended to the dour and earnest. In San Francisco, the mood was more eclectic, and not just because of the 'Transsexual Vegan Lesbian Epidemiologist Punk For Peace' (really). The sign designers had put a lot of effort into detailed retouching of photographs: Dick Cheney was Der Fiihrer ('already in his bunker'), but so was Bush (`Stop The Bushitler'). There was a sign saying 'The Difference Between Bush And Saddam Is That Saddam Was Elected'. Yes, indeed. No hanging chads in Halabja. There was an Uncle Sam recruiting slogan: 'I Want YOU To Die For Israel. Israel Sings Onward Christian Soldiers'. One woman bore a picture of some female genitalia — possibly hers, the provenance was obscure — over the caption 'This Bush Is For Peace'. Another waxed eloquent: 'Trim Bush'.

Out in Mann County somewhere, other bushes for peace disrobed, lay down on a hillside and formed the words 'No War'. I wonder if there are any conflicted nudists, with a bush for Iraq and a rack for Bush. Still, we should be grateful that they've got pudenda to rally. In Iraq, according to Harold Pinter, millions of children are 'born without genitals'. Something to do with 'depleted uranium', the Great Satan's calling card.

Conspicuously absent were even the pro forma denunciations of Saddam — 'Of course I want to see Saddam removed. hut. ' As John le Carte put it in the Times, 'I would love to see Saddam's downfall — just not on Bush's terms and not by his methods. And not under the banner of such outrageous hypocrisy.' The enemy of my enemy is my real enemy.

Thus, the main planks of the anti-war platform: it's not all about oil, it's also about Hitler, the Florida recount, dying for those devious Jews, and letting me show you my pubes. The much-invoked Gandhi managed to get through a demo without whipping his loincloth off, but then he had a goal he wanted to achieve.

So I couldn't have been happier. After a weekend-long narcissistic freakshow, the pro-war numbers were bound to go up.

And then Rumsfeld went on TV.

On ABC, the Secretary of Defense told his interviewer that war with Iraq could be avoided if the senior leadership in that country and their families could be provided haven in some other country'. Hang on. You mean, if Saddam, his sons and a couple of other A-list psychos move into Robert Mugabe's granny flat, that's it? Game over? In the last year, neither Rummy nor any other administration player has ever expressed such a shrivelled war aim. At first, I assumed some peeling flakes of lead paint from the dressing-room radiator had momentarily deranged him. But then he chugged over to Fox News and expanded on his remarks. It would appear to be an official 'talking point'.

The President, said Rumsfeld, has 'made a decision that Saddam Hussein should be disarmed. His hope is that it can be done through peaceful means. His hope, if it can't, is that Saddam Hussein will leave the counuy.. . . His neighbouring states are in a process now of trying to avoid a conflict there by having him leave the country. It would be a good thing for the world if he left.'

No, no, no. 'We don't want,' said Talib Aziz Alhamdani of the Iraqi National Congress. 'a situation where you finish off Hitler, but you leave the Nazis in control.' Swapping Saddam for a less psychopathic Saddamite who forswears extraterritorial ambitions and agrees only to a little light terrorism of his own people would be a total waste of time. Saddam himself is not the crux of the matter. I enjoy reading about the old monster's romantic novels and Sinatra LP collection, and his habit of swimming his morning laps naked so that his guards are forced to look at his incredibly tiny penis without tittering. All fascinating stuff. But it's not about Saddam any more than it was about Osama bin Laden, 1957-2001. As Tony Benn would say, the personalities are getting in the way of the ishoos. The ishoo for the West is how to dismantle not Saddam's warheads but the system that produces the Saddams and Osamas. Cherrypicking a more pliable strongman or strongmen won't do it. What kind of Iraqi president does Rumsfeld have in mind? A man in the mould of such renowned Washington allies as Hosni Mubarak? Mubarak's Egypt produced the leader of the 11 September murderers, the principal Islamist agitator in Britain, the highest-ranking al-Qa'eda terrorist in Canada, etc. There's no point even bothering with Iraq if you're going to settle for a Mubarak.

Rummy going wobbly on the telly (wasn't that a 1950s novelty song?) is a dispiriting sight, especially after the peaceniks had so resoundingly confirmed their utter irrelevance to any serious consideration of the Middle East. One could argue that it's no worse than Colin Powell in late September 2001 announcing his willingness to work with 'moderate' Taleban. But the difference between the administration's most prominent dove talking softly-softly two weeks after 9/11 and its most prominent hawk doing the same after a year of inactivity is a measure of the drift in purpose of this war. Despite the fondest hopes of the 'peace' movement, the actual war in Iraq will be no more of a 'quagmire' than Afghanistan was. But this phoney war is already a big boggy quagmire, in which every casus belli is seized on by America's 'allies' as a casus for yet another deferment. Hans Blix hasn't found anything? See? That proves there's no need to go to war. What's that? He's uncovered some chemical warheads. Well, there you are. That proves the inspections are working. We need to give them more time, see what else he finds.

The best indicator that the Americans are still serious is, as it happens, the 26,000 additional British troops and the dispatch of the Ark Royal. Her Majesty's overstretched forces have to be redeployed from other pressing assignments, and if the government were bluffing I don't think they'd do it on such a lavish scale: even the Grand Old Duke of York only jerked around 10,000 men. So Duke Tone is pre sumably not just marching 'em out in order to march 'em back again. As Rumsfeld said in more rhetorically certain times, 'If you're going to cock it, you throw it.' Britain and America have been doing too much cocking not to throw something.

But the danger is that the longer the phoney war goes on, the more likely it is that the real war gets scaled back, that (as the sign says) Bush does indeed get trimmed. The President has to do something soon not to look ridiculous. That doesn't mean that he should do as little as it takes to avoid looking ridiculous, One of the peculiarities of this conflict is that we right-wing crazies are now the idealists and the Left are the realpolitik cynics. I mentioned the other week John Pilger's pitiful performance on Australian TV, where he couldn't seem to grapple with the idea that al-Qa'eda had blown up Bali in part because of the West's support for East Timor. Last weekend's marchers were effectively consigning another of their sometime pet causes, the Kurds, to the garbage can. Anti-Americanism trumps all. Tough luck, Kurds. John le Carrel claims he would 'love' to see Saddam's downfall, but he's not prepared to do anything to make it happen, and so, if left to him, it never will.

Conversely, we on the Right have been the ones arguing that the peoples of the Middle East deserve their freedom. This isn't because we're starry-eyed, but because, being hard-hearted right-wingers, we understand that there's no alternative. As long as the Arab states are such comprehensive failures, their leaders will have a vested interest in making sure their wretched subjects remain mired in a grievance culture that blames that failure on others — i.e., us. Given the rate of Muslim emigration to Europe, Australia and North America, the psychosis of their failure has already spread to Manchester, Copenhagen, Paris, Sydney, Buffalo and Toronto. In the end, difficult as it will be, the problem has to he fixed at source, and the best place to do that with a reasonable shot at success is Iraq — the least Islamist of Arab societies.

In most Muslim countries, as bad as the government is, its opponents are worse — that goes for Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, the Palestinian Authority. .. . The Iraqi National Congress is a notable exception to that rule. What's more, anyone who says you can't create a functioning civilised society in Iraq overlooks the fact that there's already one: beneath the AngloAmerican no-fly zones, the Saddam-free Kurdish areas of Iraq have quietly created democratic political structures including multiparty legislatures and accountable executives and prime ministers; there is a free press and an independent judiciary, including female judges, and universities that teach subjects other than suicide bombing and the descent of Jews from pigs. These are imperfect statelets, but then so are Wales and Quebec and California. The important point is there are not a lot of Kurds sitting in West Midlands council flats plotting jihad. They've got better things to do. If the Left were really as progressive as they claim to be, these are the fellows they'd be talking up. Instead, the 'peace' crowd's committed to keeping the Iraqi people in a prison state of arbitrary barbarism. Some peace. Meanwhile, many of us on the Right think the Kurdish experiments are worth spreading to the rest of Iraq and then beyond. The best future for a post-Saddam state is as a loose federation whose central government has minimal powers but international guarantees. You can't do that if you simply transfer power from a Baath party monster to a Baath party apparatchik.

In other words, removing Saddam is a means, not an end. When Joschka Fischer twitters hysterically (as he did this week) about 'disastrous consequences for longterm regional stability', he implicitly acknowledges this; he understands that creating a decentralised, secular democracy in Iraq will have a knock-on effect on its neighbours. Why this bothers him is a more perplexing matter. 'Regional stability' has worked out swell for the House of Saud, the Assads and the Ayatollahs, but it's hard to see why it's been so great for Herr Fischer and his pals. Six months or so back, I laid out in The Spec how the benefits of destabilisation might play out, from Iran to Syria. That's what Saddam's neighbours are terrified of. That's why Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has cooked up another one of his laughable 'peace plans',

one that calls for Saddam to relocate and everything else to stay the same. If that happens, it will be a catastrophic defeat for the Americans. The re-making of Iraq is meant to rattle the terror-exporting Saudis. The overthrow of Saddam would merely let them off the hook. Again.

This phoney war began round about the time of Abdullah's last non-starter of a peace plan — the Palestinian one. It has been a dispiriting period for Bush backers, who don't understand why he allowed himself to lose control of the timetable. It has been incredibly damaging in all but the most narrow partisan sense (November's elections). But we can forgive Bush the phoney war as long as it's followed by a blitzkrieg (might as well stick with the Bushitler talk). The US has to hit Iraq hard — not by killing civilians but by killing Saddam and a big chunk of his acolytes. He can't be another Osama or Mullah Omar, when there's enough of a question-mark over his fate to enable 26page memos to be issued in his name from beyond the grave. Nor can he go into exile, even in a dump like North Korea. Saddam has George Bush Sr to thank for these last 12 years; he shouldn't be given another dozen by another Bush.

Don Rumsfeld, perhaps the sharpest thinker in the cabinet, must know all this. So the only reason he'd say such a thing is that war's going to start any day now. Isn't it?