Amid the clouds of deception, US speeds along road to war

This is the summer of the phoney war against Iraq; expect much smoke but very little fire. But come the autumn, expect it to get real.
During the past few weeks newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic have revealed in breathless terms the latest plan to invade Iraq. They have described massive thrusts by armour from all sides; airborne attacks to take out Baghdad; vast seaborne raids. Saddam Hussein, according to one version, will be removed by dissidents inserted into Iraq backed by US Special Forces. Alternatively, Saddam will be taken out in a precision strike.

Civilian officials in the Bush administration have huffed and puffed about the 'leaks', to the amusement of the intelligence and military professionals. 'One thing you can say with an awful lot of certainty,' one told The Observer last week, 'is that there is going to be an awful lot of deception going on over the next few months.'

Deception is one of the oldest of the military's black arts. In the Second World War, the British persuaded the Germans that the Allied invasion plan for the Continent would be through Italy by dumping the body of a bogus officer in the sea carrying false plans for the Germans to find. With the modern media, there is no need for The Man Who Never Was: 'leaks' and 'secrets' are compulsive to journalists.

But the fact of the existence of deception operations is important in itself. It is, in the terminology of these things, a 'combat indicator' - one of the clues that suggest things are fast on the road to getting bloody.

And not all of it is necessarily deception. The military - like all complex organisations - is prone to the same rivalries and disagreements over tactics. Leaking can be lobbying by other means.

There have been other signs and indicators suggestive of the timing of a campaign against Iraq. Manufacturers of cruise missiles and precision-guided munitions in the US have been working overtime to replace the weapons expended in Afghanistan. The American military transport fleet of trucks has been ordered in for rapid servicing. In Chicago last week a freight train loaded with military trucks, painted for desert service, passed through the city. Most tellingly, discreet inquiries have already been made about the availability of tankers to transport the fuel required for war.