All summer, as the Iraq debate roiled and the Bush administration seemed locked on autopilot, springing leaks and exposing policy rifts, a mysterious question hung in the air. Why weren’t we hearing from the president himself? Did Bush intend war or not? Was his mind made up, or was he waiting to weigh the evidence and his advisors’ counsel? You could give him the benefit of the doubt, as the Iraq-policy news gyrated wildly, by assuming the latter.

But a story by Elisabeth Bumiller in Saturday’s New York Times suggests that, in fact, Bush’s mind has been made up all along, but that the delay in his communicating his views to the American people was the result of simple P.R. planning. Hear the words of White House chief of staff Andrew Card: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.” And Bush political guru Karl Rove says, in the same piece, “There was a deliberate sense that this was not the time to engage in his process. The thought was in August the president is sort of on vacation.”

So: The product launch for Gulf War II had to wait a month because August is a lousy time to sell wars. And you didn’t want your President Bush to cut short or otherwise mess up his vacation — lord knows what he might do if he didn’t get enough rest.

All of which may actually make perfect sense in terms of poll-swaying realpolitik. The Sept. 11 anniversary no doubt does make a better occasion to whip up a war hysteria — and Rove has lined up some peachy, TV-friendly backdrops for Bush’s two major speeches this coming week.

There’s just one little nagging problem here: The Iraq hawks keep telling us that the threat from Saddam Hussein is so urgent that an invasion cannot wait for U.N. inspectors, sanctions, more evidence of Saddam’s possession of “weapons of mass destruction,” or a good old congressional debate (though Bush is now grudgingly accepting that need). Time’s a-wasting — we must have “regime change” now. But, hey, we can delay everything for a whole month if that makes things more convenient for White House TV consultants, and for Bush’s ranch schedule.

Andrew Sullivan is back from vacation and blogging away, reminding me both of how regularly I disagree with him, and of how much I still find reading him valuable.

He is an able rhetorical tactician, and sometimes you have to stop reading and step back to decode those tactics. For some time now, Sullivan has referred to those who do not share his exact hard-line, pro-Bush stances as “the forces of appeasement” or “the appeasement brigade.” In applying this label he is, of course, associating his opponents with Neville Chamberlain and the other European leaders who, in the dark days of the 1930s, chose either not to oppose Hitler’s aggressive moves against Germany’s neighbors, or to oppose them with insufficient spine.

This invocation of the Nazi analogy skirts perilously close to Godwin’s Law, but it’s worth examining. An “appeasement” policy depends on the notion of propitiation: There’s a threat, but you believe, somehow, that you can give your enemy what he wants and avert the threat — you can stop Hitler from going after you by giving him Czechoslovakia.

But there is no Czechoslovakia today. If there were any true advocates of appeasement right now, you could identify them by their willingness to give in to some demand of our enemies. (The “war brigade” does not like to be pressed too hard to define exactly who our enemies are, which makes this a little problematic, but for the sake of argument let’s name al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, whom we can widely agree on.) Well, what are those demands? There are none. Which makes the whole “appeasement” argument a big red herring.

Now, if you really wanted to get interesting here, you could say that, while al-Qaida has no explicit demands, it does have some goals: It would like to see the West’s freedoms curtailed, our open society hobbled, American democracy undermined and replaced by theocracy.

But, no, you won’t find me calling John Ashcroft an “appeaser”!

Josh Marshall offers a smart commentary on the strange noises emanating from the White House about whether either Cheney or Powell was out of line in their recent comments on Iraq policy:

William Safire attempts to parse the apparent rift between Bush pere and Bush fils on Iraq policy today. It’s kind of a contorted column, arguing that there can’t possibly really be disagreement between the old Bush and the new, but admitting that, gee, that’s what it looks like. The weirdest note in the column, though, is the suggestion that the whole thing is “high political drama worthy of a Shakespeare.”

If either Bush could express himself with the skill of Shakespeare’s most insignicant spear-carrier, maybe Safire would have had a point. Given that these are probably the nation’s two least eloquent presidents in memory, and given that our current leader is barely able to get out a sentence without mangling the language, suggesting that any business between the two of them has even the remotest Bardic whiff is beyond ludicrous.

Hamlet’s advice to the players, remember, was to “speak the speech” “trippingly on the tongue” — not “tripping over the tongue.”

William Safire’s voice is generally one to be reckoned with. His arguments on behalf of the case for war on Iraq tend to be more nuanced and more detailed than those of others on the right — and certainly than the administration’s. But today he overreaches in a big way.

For the U.S. to attack Iraq, we need evidence of an imminent threat from Iraq, or, failing that, Iraq’s direct participation in global terrorism. As evidence of the latter, Safire cites the name of an Iraqi intelligence officer who “headed a force of some 120 Arab terrorists backed by about 400 renegade Kurds who were remnants of a defeated separatist group.” This force “was sent by Saddam into the portion of northern Iraq under U.S. aerial protection to assassinate the democratic Kurdish leadership and to establish crude chemical warfare facilities in remote villages near the Iranian border.” This force was aided by another figure Safire names, an Al-Qaida officer who helped organize Saddam’s anti-Kurdish force. Safire reports that both these men were captured by the Kurds and are now talking to “American counterterror agents,” providing evidence that Saddam has developed a “cyanide cream” that kills on contact and that he tried to ship out to the West through Turkey (where it was intercepted).

So what does the prove — aside from what we knew already, that Safire has really good sources among the Kurds? We already know Saddam has used chemical weapons in the past and is probably doing everything he can to develop them further. We already know that Saddam would like to wipe the Kurds off the face of the earth. What we don’t have, and what Safire’s detailed information does not further provide, is any conclusive evidence linking Saddam directly to the 9/11 attacks or any other indication that he is presently an active international threat on a scale that demands massive military intervention.

Saddam is an evil dictator. But what strategy will best protect the West from terrorism and lead Iraq toward a more democratic future? The harder the go-it-aloners struggle to make their case, the more it looks like they have chosen their martial course in advance, and are now working overtime to assemble scraps of evidence that might, kinda, sorta support that course. If the U.S. is to launch a pre-emptive, unilateral strike against a nation halfway around the world we’d better know why we’re fighting.

Safire writes: “The need to strike at an aggressive despot before he gains the power to blackmail us with the horrific weapons he is building and hiding is apparent to most Americans, including those who will bear the brunt of the fight.” Since much of the U.S. public and the U.S. military has big questions about Bush’s Iraq war plan, this statement sounds like wishful thinking.