War by Christmas and perhaps much sooner. That is the latest estimate from Washington and abroad. Whether the economic embargo could ever force Saddam Hussein to retreat from Kuwait may never be known. "Our worst-case scenario," says an Arab diplomat involved in the allies' deliberations, has Saddam acceding to Bush's public demands. But the alliance's true objective has moved beyond restoring the status quo ante to the destruction of Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological warfare capacities, a goal almost no one believes can be achieved through negotiation. Hence "the logic of war," to borrow Francois Mitterrand's phrase.
The policy now being...
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