Dan Plesch: Blair is walking into a dogfight on Bush's ranch: Internal rivalry and factionalism are driving US policy on Iraq. So where do we fit in?

By this time next Sunday, Tony Blair will have finished discussing the attack on Iraq at President Bush's Texas ranch. Mr Blair and his advisers are not just resigned to having to go along with the US; there is genuine enthusiasm for taking action against a dictator whom the Prime Minister believes to be public enemy number one.

But these enthusiasms are confined to the inner circle at No 10. The Chief of Defence Staff, Sir Michael Boyce, has reflected the views of senior figures in the military establishment by suggesting that we should learn to live with weapons of mass destruction, and that if, as he put it, Britain was deliberately going to put its "hand in the mangle" of Afghanistan, we should not simultaneously do so in Iraq.

Scepticism about military expeditions to Iraq and the recent deployment of troops to Afghanistan has spread beyond the usual suspects. A retired wing commander rang me to express his fears about our troops operating under the command of the US army. His peacetime service under US air force generals had been bad enough, he said, and US army generals were of poorer quality.