The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations 'particularly directed at... UN Security Council Members (minus US and GBR, of course)' to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.

The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.

The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is 'mounting a surge' aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also 'policies', 'negotiating positions', 'alliances' and 'dependencies' - the 'whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.

What would a plausible alternative look like? The way to avoid a big war is to intensify the little war that the United States is already fighting. It is using force against Iraq every day — to protect the no-flight zones and to stop and search ships heading for Iraqi ports. Only the American threat to use force makes the inspections possible — and possibly effective.

When the French claim that force is a "last resort," they are denying that the little war is going on. And, indeed, France is not participating in it in any significant way. The little war is almost entirely the work of American and British forces; the opponents of the big war have not been prepared to join or support or even acknowledge the work that the little war requires.

But Mr. Bush could stop the American march toward the big war if he challenged the French (and the Germans and the Russians) to join the little war. The result would not be a victory for Mr. Hussein or Mr. Chirac, and it would ensure that the Iraqi regime would get weaker over time.

So here is an exit strategy for the Bush administration. They haven't asked for it, but they need it. First, extend the northern and southern no-flight zones to include the whole country. America has already drastically restricted Iraqi sovereignty, so this would not be anything new. There are military reasons for the extension — the range of missiles, the speed of planes, the reach of radar all make it difficult for the United States and Britain to defend the northern and the southern regions of Iraq without control of central airspace. But the main reason would be punitive: Iraq has never accepted the containment regime put in place after the gulf war, and its refusal to do that should lead to tighter and tighter containment.

One of the most important changes in the Middle East since the last war against Iraq has been the proliferation of satellite news services. The small satellite dish is now a familiar fixture at apartment buildings, cafes and other public gathering places, distributing news through four Arabic-language channels.

Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, is by far the most powerful, with some 35 million viewers. It still reflects an Arab point of view, but it is far more independent than the old government-controlled broadcasters that dominated the Middle East until a few years ago. In addition, CNN has expanded its own reach. The network estimates it now has viewers in 10 million households in the region.

As a result of this widespread dissemination of information, the fundamental structure of Middle East politics has been altered, if not over-hauled. Today, political pressure develops quickly and independently from the ground up, not just from the top down, a dramatic difference from a decade ago.

Two world wars and countless regional conflicts have since ravaged the globe. The merchants of death are still in business.

Iraq's Weapons Declaration underscores a tragic irony: The United States, the world's leading arms supplier, is taking the world to war to stop arms proliferation in the very country to which it shipped chemicals, biological seed stock and weapons for more than 10 years.

The "moral clarity" Bush's publicists salute him for gives fearful permissions. Against evil, all means are sanctified. Attacking a nation half of whose inhabitants are children could coat our noble ends so thick in blameless blood as to make us recoil before the wages of our idealism. "Contain" evil? Intolerable to Bush. Never mind that the empirically evil Saddam has been contained for a decade and could be contained with even greater surety by a permanent inspection regime backed by the threat of force from troops stationed on his doorstep. Bush's coercive diplomacy has tightened Saddam's containment. But "moral clarity" prevents Bush from recognizing his equivocal but evolving success, which looks like a compromise with evil rather than with reality, from which he gives signs of having cut loose.