This report just came out in the Guardian, and is worth reproducing nearly in full (omitting a bit at the end about the EU).

Washington was forced to admit for the first time last night that it might have to start the war against Iraq without British forces because of the internal political problems heaping up for Tony Blair.

The US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that Mr Blair’s difficulties had caused the White House to contemplate going to war without its closest ally.

After talks with his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon, Mr Rumsfeld said that the British role in an assault was now “unclear” and that Washington was well aware that the Blair government’s freedom of action might be restrained by a rebellious parliament.

“Their situation is distinctive to their country and they have a government that deals with a parliament in their distinctive way,” Mr Rumsfeld said. “And what will ultimately be decided is unclear as to their role; that is to say, their role in the event a decision is made to use force.”

Mr Rumsfeld’s remarks provoked a mixture of panic and fury in Downing Street and the Ministry of Defence last night. After frantic telephone calls between Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Hoon, the Pentagon issued a clarification of Mr Rumsfeld’s remarks, although there was no retraction.

In the written statement, Mr Rumsfeld added: “In my press briefing today, I was simply pointing out that obtaining a second United Nations security council resolution is important to the United Kingdom and that we are working to achieve it.”

The row over his remarks came amid growing tension between Washington and London on the diplomatic front. Sharp differences have emerged over the British strategy in pursuit of a second resolution authorising war.

Britain insisted yesterday that it was close to winning over the six “undecided” security council members and that the vote will go ahead this week.

Mr Rumsfeld said that if Britain failed to participate in the initial assault, it could still have a role in the post-Saddam policing of Iraq.

Going to war without British troops would represent a complication for US military planners, who are struggling to craft an alternative to using Turkey as a launch pad for a northern offensive.

The absence of Britain from the invasion force would also represent a serious political blow for George Bush, who has sought to convince American public opinion that he is not acting unilaterally.

Mr Rumsfeld said discussions were under way between Washington and London on a “daily or every other day basis”, and that the prospect of going to war without Britain was now being actively contemplated.

“That is an issue that the president will be addressing in the days ahead, one would assume,” he said.

Mr Rumsfeld’s comments and Mr Blair’s intensive attempts to garner more support for a second resolution mean that the next 72 hours could be the most dangerous of the prime minister’s time in power.

Failure to secure the resolution might force him to accept that British forces cannot participate in the invasion.

According to British sources, Washington is alarmed at the extent to which the British government is prepared to be flexible in offering compromises to the six “undecided” members.

Cameroon, Guinea, Angola, Mexico, Chile and Pakistan yesterday demanded that the proposed US-British ultimatum, set last week for March 17, be extended to allow Iraq 45 days to disarm.

They also suggested that Saddam Hussein be given a short list of disarmament tasks to complete.

The White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, insisted that the proposal to push back the March 17 deadline by a month was “a non-starter.” But the UK ambassador to the UN, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, offered the six an extension to the end of the month and was ready to concede ground over the benchmarks.

British sources hinted that Mr Bush was becoming alarmed at being dragged into an increasingly messy process.

Mr Blair desperately needs the second resolution to prevent revolt by his ministers and MPs.

Panic gripped Downing Street on Monday after the French president, Jacques Chirac, said in a televised interview that he would veto the resolution.

Mr Blair has apparently been told by government lawyers that without a second resolution, it will be illegal for Britain to participate in war.

My instant analysis is that Rumsfeld’s comments have just about killed any chance of British participation in a war. They are a gratuitous kick in the teeth for Blair, and the reported “panic and fury” in Downing Street reflects this. A lot of consequences follow:

(1) If the US dumps Britain, this will probably mean that there will either be no second resolution, or one that the US rather than France will have to veto.

(2) If Britain pulls out and there is no second resolution, the Turkish government won’t try a second Parliamentary vote.

(3) Howard will probably stick with Bush although even this isn’t clear – I suspect he’ll be writing his own political obituary if he supports a war now.

(4) If (1)-(3) happen, even the participation of Qatar cannot be counted on.

(5) The logistic chaos arising from the consequences I’ve spelt out would either delay war for weeks/months or push the US to adopt some sort of high risk strategy. The risk could be military (a hastily rejigged plan for a land invasion) or political (a carpet-bombing campaign with massive Iraqi casualties).

(6) Contemplation of consequences like (1)-(5) might deter Bush from going ahead

All this raises the question of why Rumsfeld would have spoken as he did. But I think a sufficient explanation is that Rumsfeld doesn’t have a clue what he’s doing.

Anyway, that’s as good a reaction as I can give at zero notice. Comments and further information would be much appreciated.

UpdateThis is stunning. All the British media are running this as a lead story, but the US media have ignored it completely – the NYT buries Rumsfeld’s comments halfway down a long piece entitled US Would Accept Short Extension of Iraq Deadline and the others don’t mention them at all as far as I can see. It’s no wonder the Administration is doing such a lousy job of rallying world opinion.

Meanwhile, Steven Den Beste (who seems perfectly attuned to the thinking of the Rumsfeld faction in the Administration, though he says, and I believe, that he has no inside contacts) pushes the case for dumping Blair and going it alone. He also notes reports that

The Turkish government is letting us deploy troops secretly for a northern front despite last week’s parliantary action. If true, that’s welcome news.

On the contrary, it’s a potential disaster for both Bush and the Turkish government if it’s exposed, as it surely must be if the troops are to be used.

One minimal side benefit of all this is that should put an end to all those tiresome arguments about whether Bush’s policy is ‘unilateralist’. Rumsfeld has clearly staked out a unilateralist position with no fig-leaves about a ‘coalition of the willing’. It remains to be seen whether Bush will be foolish enough to back him.

Further update Not surprisingly, Calpundit and Maureen Dowd share my assessment of Rumsfeld’s remarks as gratuitously stupid. A bit more surprisingly, so does Andrew Sullivan.

The pro-war case sinks to a new low in today’s Oz. David Martin-Jones wants to nail Australian opponents of war with Iraq with hypocrisy because they supported intervention in East Timor without UN authorisation. The only problem is he can’t find anyone to pin the tag on, apart from unnamed Sydney demonstrators who accused Howard of being “In bed with genocide” (a slogan which could equally refer to Australia’s long-standing complicity in the illegal occupation of East Timor), and (also unnamed) figures in the ALP who wanted Howard to “do something”. As far as I know, no significant public figure in Australia advocated a military intervention to forcibly eject the Indonesians, even in the period of militia rampages after the referendum, and of course, the actual intervention took place only after the Indonesians had announced their withdrawal.

In fact, it’s Martin-Jones who’s the hypocrite here. Suharto was an evil dictator who invaded a neighboring country in defiance of the UN and murdered hundreds of thousands of people in both Indonesia and East Timor. The moral case for an invasion to overthrow him was just as strong as the case against Saddam, but we didn’t hear it from Martin-Jones or, as far as I know, from anyone currently supporting war. Of course, the practical arguments against an invasion were so overwhelmingly strong (militarily risky, bound to generate hostility in the region and resentment of occupying forces, likely to lead to the breakup of the country etc) that no-one even contemplated it, but people like Martin-Jones contemptuously dismiss similar concerns in relation to Iraq.

(As someone will doubtless point out, there’s still the separate issue of WMDs, but the US case here has fallen to pieces – the only reasonable argument for invasion is based on the nature and history of Saddam’s regime).

In a post entitled America and the Left, Ken Parish has returned to the theme that, in criticising the Bush Administration, I am taking an anti-American line. I should note before going any further, that Ken has posted a comment to the effect that he regrets the personal nature of his criticism. However, he doesn’t withdraw the basic claim that, if you oppose the foreign policy of the US government all or most of the time, you are anti-American.

As Ken correctly says, of US governments since 1960, the only ones whose foreign policy I agreed with were those of Carter and Clinton (I should add that my judgement of the Kennedy administration is purely retrospective. I’m just old enough to remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, but I’m pretty sure I’d never heard his name before that day).

I could quibble with this in a number of ways. For example, I’m on the record as an admirer of both Eisenhower and FDR, and I have mixed opinions about Truman, so if I can start the clock in 1932, I come out almost exactly neutral. If you add in domestic policy, where I admire LBJ, I can just about qualify as pro-American.

But the main point is that Ken’s whole position (one that is shared my many supporters of the current US Administration) is nonsensical. I’ve had strong opinions about Australian politics for over thirty years. For all but three of those years I’ve been more critical of the government than supportive (and even in those three years my feelings were mixed by the end). I’ve publicly attacked governments of both parties, week in and week out, for the last decade, and have been attacked with vigour in my turn. In that entire time, as far as I can recall, no-one has ever accused me of being anti-Australian or unAustralian, and I’m sure that no-one who made such a claim would be taken seriously.

A government, even a democratically-elected one, is not the same as the country it governs. Both citizens and non-citizens can oppose the policy of a government without being hostile to the country it governs

Mark Chambers pointed me to this speech by Vermont governor and Democratic presidential aspirant Howard Dean. It’s a long time until 2004, but I think there’s a fair chance that someone like Dean, who’s openly opposed to war with Iraq, will look better than the majority of the Democrats who’ve waffled* on the issue.

* In the US, “waffle” means “speak evasively”, in Australia “speak to no purpose”. Both are applicable.

One of the unquestioned assumptions in the Iraq debate has been that war would be over quickly. The political importance of this has increased with the likelihood that the UNSC will not authorise a war, so that a drawn out war would pose big political risks, particularly for Blair.

So what is the evidence for a quick war? The standard US strategy in recent wars has been a month or two of bombing before sending in ground troops. In the Gulf War, the ground attack was preceded by five weeks of bombing. In Kosovo, bombing lasted almost three months. In Afghanistan there was five weeks of bombing before Kabul fell. In every case, there were incidents where bombs went astray with large-scale civilian casualties. The obvious reason for this approach is to minimise US casualties.

A ‘quick-war’ strategy with the name “Shock and Awe” has been mooted. Apparently, it involves massive bombing of both military targets and civilian infrastructure, designed to break the enemy’s will in a matter of days. This is an old strategy – Guernica, Rotterdam, the Blitz, the Allied bombing of Dresden, ‘bombing Vietnam back to the Stone Age’ etc., and would almost certainly involve the commission of war crimes on a major scale. As the name indicates, it relies on the psychological assumption that bombing can terrify opponents into submission, an assumption that has proved unreliable in the past. I find it difficult to believe that Bush would adopt such a strategy, or that Blair would go along with it. Even Howard might balk at it.

A lot of readers are better-informed about military matters than I am. Is there a plausible US strategy that doesn’t involve either a lengthy period of bombing or an all-out blitz with massive civilian casualties?

Update Today’s SMH asserts that there is, claiming a large-scale, but ‘precision’ bombing of Baghdad that would spare civilian infrastructure will be accompanied by an immediate ground invasion.