It also explains why some generals are briefing the press against their own boss. For no one has any doubt that Mr Rumsfeld is still a hawk on Iraq, as is the President.George Bush is a formidable man who combines a strong personality with considerable intelligence. But he faces two insuperable obstacles in conveying that message, especially to Europeans The first is his linguistic infelicity. He may eventually complete George Bush Snr’s unfinished war against Saddam. He will never succeed in avenging his father’s defeat at the hands of the English language.President Bush’s second problem is his directness. Animated by a strong Christian faith and a simple sense of duty, he believes in telling the truth. In that respect, the fractured, homespun language helps him, in America if not in Europe It not only sounds sincere; it is sincere.

Among senior politicians, George Bush is unique in his lack of guile.This does not help him to win over sophisticated audiences But it should help any of his audiences to get the message. When he tells us that he intends to wrap up Afghanistan and then deal with Saddam, that is precisely what he plans to do. At least as regards the President’s intentions, Bill Kristol and other critics are playing for a spin which is not there.The critics still have a point. The strike against Saddam does not have to wait upon the completion of the Afghan mission, whatever that means An undoubted threat is still posed by al- Qa’ida. That organisation has neither lost its malice nor all of its capabilities. Only the vigilance of American and European intelligence services has prevented further atrocities. On Friday, Mr Cheney addressed naval cadets at Annapolis, Maryland, in sombre terms, warning them that further outrages were inevitable.

We have, alas, no reason to believe that he is exaggerating.That said, America has the resources to impose peace in Afghanistan and pursue al-Qa’ida without compromising its ability to invade Iraq. Any general who argues to the contrary is trying to pervert strategy to confound policy.Unfortunately, however, these reluctant generals have allies. Some right-wingers delude themselves that America need not invade Iraq in order to overthrow Saddam; that the US could use local surrogates such as the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south. This is the fantasy which is compounding the error that the Allies made in 1991, when they ended the Gulf War at the Iraqi border (Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf were so keen to do this that some observers wondered whether they were competing to use “The Hundred Hours War” as the title of their memoirs). All those miscalculations stem from a single source: they underrate Saddam Hussein.America can get Saddam, but in order to do so, it will have to go in and get him. The dissident generals are trying to alarm everyone with talk of an invasion force of 200,000 But there is no need for alarm.