The man who could stop Blair supporting a US war against Iraq

War with Iraq, previously a nebulous prospect, has come sharply into focus in the first two weeks of this year. Much has been resolved. In Washington Donald Rumsfeld has lost the argument. His original idea that a light and fast raiding party would, with the aid of an uprising from grateful Kurds and Shiites, be enough to destroy Saddam has been squashed by US generals. Nothing is to be left to chance. It is now clear that a more ponderous force of perhaps 250,000 will be brought to bear.

The British role is also clearer: it will be much less important than at one time thought. The involvement of the British army will be as militarily negligible as it is politically significant. This is an arrangement that will suit Tony Blair as much as it does the US military. It is frustrating, however, for British soldiers. The 7th Army Brigade has been exercising on the north German plain for three months, impatient for the order to go to war. This has not come. For six months the British army has known that this conflict was imminent. But the generals have been left without time to make sensible preparations. Indeed, unless they are deployed very soon indeed, British troops fear they will arrive too late for the battle proper. Instead they will be entrusted with the clean-up and, later still, peacekeeping duties which will probably prove much more dangerous than the battle itself.

Some soldiers judge that this was the Prime Minister’s idea all along. They take the view that their job has been made more difficult in order to lighten the government’s difficulties with its mutinous left-wing element. Military experts note, too, that the fleet’s laborious progress towards the Gulf is testament to the way the government has neglected the armed forces.