WASHINGTON, Sept. 6 — White House officials said today that the administration was following a meticulously planned strategy to persuade the public, the Congress and the allies of the need to confront the threat from Saddam Hussein.

The rollout of the strategy this week, they said, was planned long before President Bush's vacation in Texas last month. It was not hastily concocted, they insisted, after some prominent Republicans began to raise doubts about moving against Mr. Hussein and administration officials made contradictory statements about the need for weapons inspectors in Iraq.

The White House decided, they said, that even with the appearance of disarray it was still more advantageous to wait until after Labor Day to kick off their plan.

"From a marketing point of view," said Andrew H. Card Jr., the White House chief of staff who is coordinating the effort, "you don't introduce new products in August."

A centerpiece of the strategy, White House officials said, is to use Mr. Bush's speech on Sept. 11 to help move Americans toward support of action against Iraq, which could come early next year.

"Everybody felt that was a moment that Americans wanted to hear from him," said Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser. Sept. 11 will also be a time, Mr. Rove said, "to seize the moment to make clear what lies ahead."

But the biggest gap in the coverage was about the one thing Bush said that was probably true: "It is not too late for the Iraqi military to act with honour and protect your country by permitting the peaceful entry of coalition forces to eliminate weapons of mass destruction."

Only an inside story in The New York Times caught Bush's implication: There is no choice for Iraq between regime change or invasion. The U.S. is coming in no matter what. Well, wasn't that the plan all along?

Which brings us back to the marketing campaign. The R&D on the war began years ago, in 1992 when deputy secretary of defence Paul Wolfowitz, a Pentagon strategy guy in both Bush administrations, drafted the Defence Planning Guidance on the U.S.' military stance toward the world. It advocated pre-emptive strikes against unfriendly states.

It can't be a coincidence how much that document resembles Bush's National Security Strategy of September, 2002 — or the principles outlined by the Project For The New American Century, a might-is-right organization headed by William Kristol, editor of the right-wing magazine Weekly Standard .

An internet search has turned up precious few discussions of these connections in the mainstream American, or even Canadian, media.

But here's the thing: On Sept. 11, 2001, Kristol was on PBS' Newshour With Jim Lehrer , where he said, linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, "We are basically looking at finishing the job we began in 1990 with Saddam Hussein."

The product was designed.

Only the ad campaign had to be created — and the suckers lined up to buy it.

Those Vanilla Coke people could learn a thing or two from this, no?

Although millions have marched worldwide, Bush’s war on Iraq is underway. But the peace movement is working not only to stop this war, but to lay the groundwork to prevent it from leading to future wars in Iran, North Korea, Colombia or wherever else the Bush administration sees a “target of opportunity.” This means we’ll need those now surging into the peace movement to stick around for the long haul, and not melt away when times get hard.