November Surprise?

The word among wags in Washington is that George W. Bush will invade Iraq right after the fall congressional elections, giving himself time to get the war out of the way before his own presidential campaign swings into gear. An attack before November would be difficult because the desert would be too hot for troops to maneuver with all their biochemical gear, or so the argument goes.

More importantly, launching an expensive -- and hard to justify -- assault amid a suspect economy and heated midterm battles for the House would be politically tricky, at a minimum. What's more, say those who purport to know, the defense industry needs time to build up its stock of smart bombs, run down in the razing of Al Qaeda strategic positions and Afghan villages.

With all the press speculation focused on an attack in February or March, an autumn shot might be a surprise. Since American allies in the Middle East are skittish about letting us launch attacks from their soil, aircraft carriers will be much more important than during the Persian Gulf War. By November, five of them -- each carrying up to 85 planes, including 50 strikers -- will be near enough to carry out raids. Finally, Bush's current major foreign-policy advisers, Ariel Sharon and the rest of the Israeli right, are pushing the president to go for it. They're even vaccinating hundreds of key emergency responders for smallpox, just in case the Iraqi president retaliates with an unprecedented biological assault.

"Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose," Raanan Gissin, a senior Sharon counselor, told The Guardian over the weekend. "It will only give Saddam Hussein more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

As a practical matter, while modest reservations against an attack have been voiced by such luminaries as former Daddy Bush top aide Brent Scowcroft and retiring House heavy Dick Armey, most of the criticism is actually thumb-sucking by people like Henry Kissinger, who are skilled at being on all sides all the time. The only real opposition in Congress is from the right-wing Republicans. The Democrats are demure.

The political opposition, such as it is, pretty much thinks war is in the cards. "My feeling is that the administration has staked so much in it that they're going to have an awful hard time backing down," says Noam Chomsky, the MIT linguist and author of the anti-imperialist treatise 9-11. "I suspect that they're putting such a heavy stake in it to make it difficult to back down."

Chomsky says the current hawks are mostly recycled Reaganites, bullies who steamrolled dissent in the '80s and can be expected to do the same now. "Anytime they wanted to ram through some outrageous program, they would just start screaming and Congress would collapse," he says. "I mean, it's not just Congress; it's the same in what's called intellectual discussion. Very few people want to be subjected to endless vicious tirades and lies. It's just unpleasant, so the question is, Why bother? So most people just back off."

Those Reaganites have had their own dealings with Hussein, and they remain preoccupied with him now. They were there when the U.S. helped Iraq with its chemical warfare against Iran, as The New York Times reported on Sunday, letting the world in on what everyone in Washington knew already. In fact, as Iraq gassed its enemy, the U.S. actually removed the nation from its list of terrorist states and enthusiastically increased military and other aid across the board to help Saddam beat the fundamentalist Muslims in Iran.

Unlike Saudi Arabia, Iraq never was a predictable ally for the West. In the early 1970s, Saddam signed a friendship pact with the Soviets, nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company, and strongly opposed Israel. But in the face of Iranian fundamentalism, the U.S. sought ways to curry favor with Iraq against Iran.