That obsession with American greatness is reflected in the Manichaen language the hawks use to couch their arguments about the immorality of our failing to finish the job in Baghdad. They not only talk about the need to remove Saddam in order to protect U.S. national interests, but to liberate the Iraqi people. The policies the hawks advocate is not just strategically sound, they say, but moral. It's a jihad.

"The 'war on terrorism' is not merely a war on terrorists," wrote Robert Kagan and William Kristol in a Weekly Standard editorial in October. "It is also, and perhaps even more significantly, a war against the kinds of regimes that support and employ terrorism as a deadly weapon in their war against us. Saddam Hussein ... surely represents a more potent challenge to the United States and its interests and principles than the weak, isolated, and we trust, soon-to-be crushed Taliban ... Is it conceivable that the United States would destroy the Taliban but leave the Iraqi regime untouched?"

But many see the hawks' new jihad as a way to finish other old wars -- not only against the Clinton administration and its Iraq policies, but also against key figures in the first Bush administration.

Even some critics who agree that the U.S. should get tougher on Iraq say the hawks' idea that an "Afghan" model of air strikes plus opposition support would succeed in Iraq is seriously misguided.

"Iraq is not Afghanistan," says Ken Pollack, a former CIA military analyst on Iraq and NSC official during the Clinton administration now at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It would be a much tougher problem. The Iraqi army is 10 times larger, it has much better weaponry, cohesion. Why is it that we believe that a military campaign weaker than Desert Storm would be able to accomplish what Desert Storm didn't?"

Others say that taking on Iraq now would instantly decimate the delicate consensus the U.S. has achieved for the war on terrorism.

"I do not understand the pathology that produces the attitude regarding bombing Saddam Hussein," complains a CIA analyst, speaking off the record. "The evidence of [Hussein's] involvement in the 1993 events and the attacks of last September seem to me very weak, if not entirely specious. Bombing Iraq would destroy our coalition, distract us from our focused goal of destroying terrorism, and create serious instability in Saudi Arabia and perhaps Egypt and Jordan."

Iraq hawks say those attitudes, pervasive at the CIA and the State Department, reflect bureaucratic cultures that prefer caution and consensus over changing the status quo -- a caution that's actually dangerous, given the international terror threat.

"This is typical CIA to reject a policy that was not invented there," says New American Century's Tom Donnelly. "Look at what happened to the administration's strategy in Afghanistan. Clearly in the opening phases they were content to follow State and CIA strategy of bombing just a little. But President Bush transitioned reasonably quickly to a more aggressive military campaign."

While the group enjoys a mostly sympathetic relationship with the Bush administration -- the president himself seemed to signal his support for its goals when he warned Saddam Hussein last week to let weapons inspectors return to the country or he would face severe consequences -- there have also been strains between some top officials and the hawks. Richard Perle has become such an omnipresent and authoritative voice on behalf of extending the war into Iraq that last weekend Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took the unusual step of reminding reporters that while Perle is the head of the Defense Advisory Board, he does not hold an official government position.

The most obvious tension, of course, is between the Iraq hawks and Secretary of State Colin Powell. When Wolfowitz dispatched Woolsey to the United Kingdom in early October -- in part to investigate Laurie Mylroie's claims that 1993 WTC bomber Ramzi Yousef was really a Kuwaiti-born Iraqi intelligence agent named Abdul Basit who had studied in Swansea, Wales -- he annoyed both the State Department and the CIA. According to British press reports, those agencies only discovered Woolsey's mission when the local Welsh police chief discovered that Woolsey was doing some freelance spying in town, and called the U.S. Embassy in London to inquire whether Woolsey was on official government business there. The Embassy knew nothing about it.

Tension between Wolfowitz and Powell should not be surprising. It began during the Gulf War, when both served in the first Bush administration. Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advocated stopping the war after Iraqi troops had been driven from Kuwait, while Wolfowitz advocated toppling Saddam with a combination of military strikes and support for Iraqi Shi'ia and Kurdish groups.

"Wolfowitz was a guy at the end of the Gulf War who probably had the right answer," says a former Clinton official and Iraq expert who asked not to be named. "He's the one who said we should arm and equip the Iraqi opposition forces trying to rise up against Saddam, and we should use air power to prevent the Iraqis from suppressing the insurgents. I think that he was certainly right, that is what we should have done at the time. We should have gone a couple more days."

"I think that Paul became obsessed," the former official continued, who describes shouting matches between himself and Wolfowitz over disagreements on Iraq policy. "He felt he didn't push hard enough at the end of the Gulf War. He feels he didn't fight hard enough against what he knew was the wrong answer."

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