An assault on Iraq again seems imminent. Whether it happens depends on the Iraqi leader himself, according to a Kurdish-born commentator on the Middle East. If Saddam Hussein once again misreads the signs, and the Americans get to Baghdad, will they know how to reconstruct the country?

WHAT would you do if you were an American President determined to prevent Iraq?s vast expertise and mat?riel in weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of terrorists, but wanted to achieve your aim without going to war? I dare say that you would do exactly what President George W. Bush has been doing recently. You would publicly commit your government to achieving ?regime change? in Baghdad, you would make military preparations in the Gulf region, and you would arrange for a leak to the press of your military ?plan? to attack the country from all directions. The aim of it all would be to make Iraq?s President, Saddam Hussein, so scared at the thought of losing everything that he would allow the return of the United Nations arms inspectors after four years of excluding them. The assumption would be that Saddam would subsequently cooperate fully with the inspectors in destroying all the weapons that he promised the UN he would give up in the ceasefire treaty of 1991.

Now is this really America?s strategy? If it is, then only Mr Bush and a few people close to him know it. More important is the question of whether it would work, if indeed it were America?s strategy. Here anybody?s guess is probably as good as anyone else?s, for in the past 22 years, since Saddam suddenly invaded Iran at the start of his ruinous First Gulf War, the Iraqi leader has hardly been out of our sight for long, making us all experts in his mentality.

We would all agree that his record shows him to be a reckless risk-taker. A smaller group of us would go much further and say that he is unable to function unless he believes the whole world is talking about him. He needs to be the centre of the world. The trouble comes when we try to predict his next move, because he is unpredictable. Even in the build-up to his defeat in the Second Gulf War when half-a-million Western and Muslim troops were poised to pounce on him from Saudi Arabia in January 1991, he calculated that the outside world was only bluffing, that he alone was made of steel and resolve. He visibly enjoyed himself as a whole procession of elder statesmen, from Mr Edward Heath in London to the late King Hussein in Jordan, humiliated themselves by going to Baghdad and paying homage to his court in order to persuade him to leave Kuwait. He was a caliph of Baghdad resurrected. He read all the signs to mean that America would eventually go home with its tail between its legs because it would not risk the loss of a single soldier.

On the other hand, Saddam?s left-hand vizier would whisper differently in his ear. America did attack last time and, furthermore, whenever you watch CNN news bulletins, as he does from inside one of his numerous bunkers, it is apparent that a sea change has come over the country in the wake of last September?s attacks on New York and Washington. Yet again, one must always be mindful of treachery inside the palace as the enemy increases the pressure. While he himself has nowhere to run, his army and bodyguard, even his sons, might think that they had everything to gain by doing a deal with the enemy. Ever since Mr Bush recently announced that he had authorised his special forces to ?to kill Saddam in self-defence? if necessary while trying to arrest him, one has had to become even more of a nomad than usual. Definitely one must not sleep in the same bed two nights running.

So whether there will be an American-led attack on Iraq in the late autumn or early spring will, in effect, be decided by Iraq?s own leader. He has it in his power to agree to the return of the inspectors and then allow them, if necessary, to search under beds ? actually hundreds of beds, because he was said, a few years ago, to have built himself at least 38 new palaces and holiday resorts since 1991 ? in search of the weapons of mass destruction. If he does so, America will be legally and morally disarmed. Any invasion would be opposed in forthright terms by the UN secretary-general, Kofi Annan, and probably not even Britain would dare to send a token force along to pretend that America was not acting completely alone.

My own guess is that Saddam will again misread the signs. Even if he allows the return of the inspectors, he will still believe that he can again play his old game of cat-and-mouse with them. But a single television report showing Iraqi soldiers delaying the progress of the inspectors would be enough for America. Washington would again and immediately find numerous voices to say that Saddam remains a major threat to world peace and is beyond reform.

In the build-up to the Second Gulf War, I was confident that the military conflict would be relatively easy and straightforward. The Iraqi air force did collapse virtually on the first day, as I thought it would, and the army did surrender in large numbers as soon as it saw Allied troops on the horizon. This time, however, a different set of factors will come into play and ? having sensed something of the final outcome that Washington is planning for Iraq after Saddam ? I shall be a little less enthusiastic with my applause.

For a start, the aim of the conflict will not simply be the ejection of Iraqi forces from a neighbouring country that they have occupied, but to capture the streets of Baghdad, with all the extra risks to life that that implies.

Here one must be careful not to exaggerate. Many more lives will certainly be saved if the 34-year rule of the Socialist Arab Renaissance (Ba?ath) party over Iraq is ended than might be lost in a military conflict lasting only months, or even days as Saddam was deserted by all the rings of security with which he has surrounded himself. I reckon that, since he assumed formal power in July 1979, Saddam has caused the deaths of more people than Genghis Khan and Tamerlane in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries put together. In fact one might argue that, had he not brought the wrath of America on his head in 1990, he would subsequently have acquired atomic bombs and long-range missiles ? as has Pakistan in recent years ? and then gone on to finish his business with Iran. The city of Tehran might simply not exist today.

Coming back to present circumstances, though, one can only be uneasy about the political considerations that America ponders. The Turks, who still close down Turkish television stations for daring to broadcast a love song in Kurdish for fear of losing a fifth of the country to insurrection, are telling President Bush that they would not tolerate the setting up of a federal system in Iraq in which the Kurdish north might have any autonomy. In the Shi?ite south, which makes up more than half the population of the whole land, a similar alarm is raised by the Saudis who see any democracy in Iraq as an invitation to the hardliners in neighbouring Iran to cause trouble. Yet the basic long-term reason for Iraq?s bloodshed is the hasty British decision in the 1920s to impose a Sunni Arab minority over a new state that should never have been a state. I cannot prove it, but I claim that a major reason why the poor Kurds were bombed by the Royal Flying Corps with mustard gas to force them under an Arab government was Lord Curzon?s ownership of a large stake in the petroleum fields of Kurdistan. To ignore the lessons of the past when an opportunity may be at hand to create at least a federal state in this most unfortunate of countries would be unforgivable.

As the second largest reservoir of untapped oil and gas resources in the world, however, Iraq can once more distort the judgement of great powers in favour of short-term gains. The motivation in Washington to ensure that American oil companies would be the primary exploiters of such great wealth after the overthrow of Saddam must indeed be strong. Hence the Americans? recent flirting with military defectors from Iraq, raising the prospect that Western soldiers might die to overthrow one of history?s worst dictators only for him to be replaced with one of his killers. Such an outcome would of course also please the Turks and the Saudis.

So, while I shall still welcome the removal of the shadow of the Ba?ath party from over Iraq, for the sake both of the Iraqis as a whole and of the future of the world, I shall not applaud for some time yet.

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