Judging by this report in the Washington Post, I’ve overestimated the good sense of the Bush Administration. The front-page lead is

‘White House denounces the overture as a ruse and “a tactic that will fail.”‘

It’s unclear in this context what “the White House” means, and the comments reported in the body of the story are all over the shop. But it’s hard to see how the Arab League and the Saudis, who leaned heavily on Saddam to agree to inspections, taking big risks with their domestic constituencies to do so, can see this as anything but a calculated insult. There’s still time to put a new spin on the story, but the obvious interpretation is that all the US talk about inspections was meaningless, and that the real agenda is war at any price.
The correct line, I would have thought, was something along the lines of “This is a welcome development, but Saddam has reneged on commitments before and we need to keep the pressure up”, which is roughly what was attributed to Jack Straw, the UK Foreign Secretary.

UpdateColin Powell’s response to the Iraqi cave-in is closer to the mark, but, judging by the reactions in the same report, Bush has lost most of the ground he gained in the last week. The obvious inference is that drawn by an unnamed ‘Arab official’ who

‘said that Washington seemed to have made up its mind to strike, even though Baghdad had now agreed to the world’s demands.’

“If the U.S. isn’t happy with this, it means that they have already decided to attack Iraq, whatever Iraq does,” he said.

When Bush made his UN speech I suggested that the Administration was following one of two strategies – a brilliantly effective strategy to secure the elimination of Saddam’s arsenal, or a very silly strategy to secure an invasion of Iraq. Actually, I think some in the Administration are aiming at one, some the other and some don’t know. But it’s clear that the net effect of all this confusion has been to greatly weaken the case for an invasion. Having dropped the claim that Saddam is tied to Al-Qaeda, and backed away from claims of a unilateral right to impose regime change, Bush is in the process of losing the argument that an invasion is necessary to get rid of weapons of mass destruction.