If you're a planner at the Pentagon preparing for war--figuring how to move a flotilla of cargo vessels from San Francisco to the Persian Gulf, worrying whether there's enough shrink-wrap at the port in Jacksonville, Fla., to protect the AH-64 Apache gunships and Black Hawk and Chinook helicopters you've just started to fly there from Fort Campbell, Ky.--there's one thing you always want to keep in the back of your mind. And that is the state of the night sky. The U.S. Air Force likes to begin its bombing campaigns on moonless nights, and in Iraq, for about two weeks in early March, the moon will remain below the horizon until at least 4 a.m.
By then, military officials say, there will be 250,000 American troops on Iraq's doorstep or just down the block. That's more than enough to fight any sort of war that the Pentagon may be thinking of waging. Senior officers insist, with a snappy salute, that they are capable of fighting in an Iraqi summer, but in truth they would rather not. By April, daytime temperatures exceed 100ºF, and soldiers will be hampered by heavy suits protecting them from chemical and biological weapons. Helicopters can't fly as efficiently in hot, thin air; more water has to be shipped to the front for parched and sweaty troops. All of which suggests that from the strictly military standpoint, a war, if there is a war, is more likely to start in March than later.
That fits the diplomatic timetable too. Hans Blix, the head United Nations weapons inspector, who returns from Baghdad this week, will report to the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 14 on the degree of Iraqi disarmament and cooperation. On the good assumption that Blix will not give Saddam Hussein's regime a clean bill of health, Security Council members are beginning to consider the shape of a final resolution, though no drafts have yet been circulated.
After Blix reports, deliberations in New York City are bound to take a week or so. And it's a given that Saddam will try to pull some diplomatic stunts to avoid an invasion, as he did in 1991, although President George W. Bush last week made it plain that the U.S. would not tolerate such a "last-minute game of deception. The game is over." So it will probably be sometime during those moonless nights at the beginning of March that the diplomatic phase will finally end and the military one begin. The timing of that endgame has apparently filtered down to the public. In a new TIME/CNN poll, 75% of Americans said they think a war with Iraq is inevitable, up from 63% just three weeks ago.