THE US: US Army General Tommy Franks, overall commander of American forces in the Middle East, reviewed war plans with his top military commanders in Qatar last week and concluded that the war can begin as soon as President Bush gives the order, a US official in the Gulf told the Washington Post.
Saturday's vote in the Turkish parliament denying entry to over 20,000 US troops has stunned American officials and thrown Pentagon plans for a two-pronged invasion of Iraq from north and south into disarray.
Even without Turkish support however, there is growing speculation in the US that American and British forces will stick to a war timetable that schedules an attack on Iraq in the third or fourth week of the month.
The Bush administration is so confident of a quick victory that debate among top White House and Pentagon officials is focusing on what happens the day after Iraqi forces are crushed.
President George W. Bush's comment on Friday that "disarmament means regime change" has convinced observers that war is inevitable and that Saddam Hussein can do little to prevent it, even as he improves his co-operation with UN weapons inspectors by destroying banned missiles.
A spokeswoman for Mr Bush said UN resolution 1441 "did not call for pieces of disarmament" and that the destruction of Al Samoud missiles was "part of its game of deception".
The first phase of the invasion - psychological warfare and pin-prick bombing of strategic sites - is well under way.
On Saturday, US planes dropped 240,000 leaflets in northern Iraq and 360,000 leaflets in the southern no-fly zone. One leaflet shows a dead Iraqi soldier and carries the message: "Do not risk your life and the lives of your comrades! Leave now and go home. Watch your children learn, grow and prosper."
The low-grade US and British air war against Iraq, which has for months targeted anti-aircraft weapons, has been stepped up, with five reported strikes since February 11th on ground-to-ground missiles that allegedly threaten US forces massing on Iraq's borders.
These included Iraq's Ababil-100 missiles, Frog-7 rockets and a truck-mounted Astros 2 multiple rocket launcher, according to US military briefings. US war planes bombed three mobile air-defence radars and an anti-aircraft missile system in southern Iraq on Saturday.
In addition, US Special Operations troops are reportedly making forays into Iraq on covert missions to prepare the way for later attacks and to prevent retreating Iraqi forces burning oil wells.
The invasion plan is officially a secret but many details have been deliberately leaked in Washington, partly to demoralise Iraqi troops.
"Generally, we think in the Iraqi military, particularly the regular army, morale is relatively low," said General Richard Myers, chairman of the chiefs of staff, underlining a widespread assumption that the Iraqi army will surrender quickly.
The war would start with a very short "shock and awe" bombing campaign, which would blast palaces and weapons sites but minimise damage to basic infrastructure like electricity generators, as these would have to be rebuilt by American forces after a war.
There would be an almost simultaneous invasion from Kuwait with tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Apache attack helicopters driving north towards Baghdad.
One leaked detail seemed particularly designed to terrify Iraqi soldiers.
One Iraqi unit would be wiped from the face of the earth "as a crushing lesson" to others fighting back, the Washington Post said, quoting a person who had seen the war plan.
British and US forces from Kuwait would divert east under British leadership to occupy Basra and the oil fields near it, putting US forces under foreign command for the first time in 50 years.
The vote by Turkey's parliament has disrupted plans for the US Army's 4th Infantry Division to invade from the north and General Franks may be forced to airlift the 101st Airborne Division - a lighter, air mobile force - into northern Iraq from Kuwait.
The 4th Division's tanks and other weaponry are aboard almost 40 US ships off the coast of Turkey but the soldiers remain at Fort Hood, Texas waiting a final decision.
"It's a huge setback for our purposes, it stunned me," Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said yesterday about the Turkish vote.
Senator Joseph Biden said the decision would alter the ability of the US to intercede between Turkey and Kurdish forces in northern Iraq. "That worries me a great deal in the north about the day after, the week after, the year after, the decade after," he said.
In post-war Iraq, the immediate concerns for a force President Bush categorised as liberators would be to provide Iraqis with food and medicine, and search for biological and chemical weapons to convince the world that the US was right all along to claim Saddam Hussein had secret stocks of weapons of mass destruction.
Saddam's special forces and the ruling Baath Party would be purged and the management of the oil fields possibly given to the British to remove suspicion that the US was making an oil grab, according to some reports.
National elections would take place when new political parties emerged.
Meanwhile, Gen Franks will have overall authority as military governor, and a former US general, Mr Jay Garner, will take over reconstruction and humanitarian assistance as civilian administrator.
A force of between 50,000 to 200,000 US troops will form the central authority for a minimum of six months, while American "advisers" take control of Baghdad government departments, according to a report in Time magazine, citing administration officials.
As the US moves inexorably towards war, US pressure will increase on Security Council members to back its new resolution finding that Iraq has missed its last chance to disarm.
The president reportedly wants UN backing so he can turn to other countries for support in rebuilding Iraq. His father, former President George H.W. Bush, who got UN support for Desert Storm in 1990, said in a speech last week that "it would be much better to act with as much international support as necessary".
A senior pro-US diplomat at the UN told The Irish Times that neither the US nor Britain had any intention of compromising on the wording of the resolution, which will go to a vote after council members debate the most recent report of chief weapons inspectors Hans Blix this week.
