WASHINGTON: Coming to the hyperpower capital from peace-torn Europe, I find three things. Washington is at war. Washington is going to war. And Washington is starting to think about a peace to end both wars. People need to wake up to all three.

There is some confusion here between two wars. Sometimes when Washingtonians say “the war” they mean the ‘war against terrorism’, which they are still living intensely in everyday life. Sometimes they mean the coming war with Iraq. WT and WI, as a friend tags them.

The most pressing conclusion is that Washington is going to war against Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s solemn claim that he has no more weapons of mass destruction is a blow to those who still hoped for a peaceful solution and a gift to those who think toppling him by force of arms is the only path to effective disarmament. My clear impression from talking to people inside and close to the Bush administration is that this war — WI — is now a matter of when and how rather than whether.

In his 12,000-page report to the UN, Saddam has written the longest suicide note in history. Yes, if possible the administration wants multilateral and UN support for this operation, so they’ll let the UN inspectors run around trying to check the report’s claims. But their own intelligence sources already tell them he is lying again. If need be, they will share some of that intelligence to get support from the UN security council and a wider public in the US and Europe. But then they’ll nail him.

Why? I have heard, from Americans, all the claims made by anti-American or supposedly anti-American Europeans. That Bush is doing it to distract attention from economic problems at home. (A prominent Democratic senator, John Kerry, recently raised this charge.) That it’s for oil. That he’s completing unfinished business from the first Bush administration’s Gulf war. That it’s George Bush’s personal grudge-fight to topple “the guy who tried to kill my dad”. That they’re going after Saddam because they can’t find Osama bin Laden. That it’s a war for Sharon’s Israel as much as for the United States. That it’s about winning the next presidential election, as well as the mid-term elections last month, where it produced a resounding victory for the Republicans.

I have also heard the case for this war from liberals with a strong record of advocating humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo and elsewhere. Saddam is guilty of genocide. He has actually used weapons of mass destruction against neighbours and his own people. There is a real danger of him using them again — which makes a legitimate tripwire to intervention. The only sure way to disarm him is to depose him.

But what strikes me most is how far people in or around the Bush administration do really regard the coming war with Iraq as part of an ongoing ‘war against terrorism’ — as also was Tuesday’s seizure of Scud missiles destined for Yemen. When I say “Washington is at war”, I’m not just using “Washington” as diplomatic shorthand for the US — as in “London insists” or “Paris objects”. I mean Washington, this currently freezing, handsome but driven one-topic city on the Potomac.

In the American agricultural heartlands of Kansas and Missouri last weekend, I asked farmers, students, schoolchildren and casino-goers whether they felt they were at war. Their answers ranged from a hesitant “not really” to “well, sort of”. Here, in the nation’s capital, the answer is a resounding “yes”, with a look that says “what a strange thing to ask”. Of course we’re at war.

Around the supper table, everyone has their animated tale of 9/11: the panicked rush to school to pick up the kids, the chaotic office evacuation, the column of smoke from the Pentagon, the wild rumours. The more affluent have stockpiled antidotes to anthrax, gas masks, emergency food supplies in the cellar, and even “nuke pills” — supposed to alleviate the effects of a small nuclear “dirty bomb”. Some have even moved out of Washington, or at least are glad that their children are about to. Though the expected follow-up terrorist attack has not yet come, they feel it’s just a matter of time until it does.

Washington is not just preparing to prosecute a war (WI) which it does see as part of the larger ongoing ‘war against terrorism’ (WT). Amply conscious of being the imperial capital of the most powerful country in the history of the world, it’s also beginning to think big about the longer-term path to a peace that is supposed to end these wars. An administration that came into office ideologically opposed to US involvement in so-called “nation-building” in foreign parts is now plainly committed to the long haul of so-called “nation-building” in post-invasion (or, according to preference, post-liberation) Iraq.

But that’s only for starters. This new, democratic and prosperous Iraq is to be a model and magnet for its neighbours, as west Germany and west Berlin were to their unfree neighbours in the Cold War. Vanguard thinkers talk of encouraging a velvet revolution to democratize Iran. Then there’s the United States’ rich, friendly but oppressive ally, Saudi Arabia, from whose wells many of the terrorists who attacked the US on 9/11 actually sprang. No one in the administration wants to say this publicly, but there is a clear logic that leads from the democratization of Iraq to that of Saudi Arabia. If you want to get rid of the mosquitoes, you must drain the swap. And so people are talking here about a Wilsonian project for reshaping the whole Middle East, comparable in its ambition only to those for Europe in 1919 and 1949. World-weary Europeans, and people in the region itself, may doubt both the realism of this embryonic project and the United States’s capacity to sustain it. We would better spend our time thinking how to complement and improve it. —Dawn/The Guardian News Service.