In Washington, as well as Europe, Paul Wolfowitz, deputy secretary at the Pentagon, is regarded as the most awesome of hawks in his appetite for a war to overthrow Saddam Hussein. A Republican senator I interviewed on a recent visit saw him as a weirdo whose views were so dogmatic as to put him outside the realms of normal debate. In Bob Woodward's new book, Bush at War, an essential revelatory text, Wolfowitz is reported as arguing from the start that the right response to 9/11 would be an attack on Iraq - "a brittle, oppressive regime that might break easily" - rather than an invasion of Afghanistan risking 100,000 US troops in unwinnable mountain combat. I asked him about hawkishness in a conversation yesterday in London, and notably his well-known opposition to sending UN inspectors on a futile mission to search out Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. "I'm well known for lots of things," he said drily. He comes over just now as a hawk on his best behaviour. But he doesn't think inspection has a chance of success without a fundamental change of Iraqi attitude. There was no way every computer hard-disc and every home-stored piece of poison could be simply unearthed. "This isn't a country where we've had lots of human intelligence tunnelling like crazy for years and years," he said.  Nor is the Pentagon working to the same time limit as the inspectors have declared. Last week, their spokesman said it would take at least a year before inspection had a chance of calling itself complete. It would take much less time, said Wolfowitz, "to decide if we look like going down one track or the other". As to what the test might be, as between peace and war, he resists any request to specify one. He thinks journalists are too eager to ask about trigger-events, when in fact, according to him, there is no blueprint for a war decision.  The leaders, he says, will have to make the choice. "They're not going to make it on the basis of a predetermined line that's been crossed, and somehow says the hour has come. They will have to make a judgment, balancing the positive and negative evidence." This was Wolfowitz in soothing mode, ceaselessly deferential to the president whose September decision to go to the UN was a defeat for the hawks. The question is: when will they be back?  The secretary was here to give a lecture, whose main substance changed the subject from Iraq to Washington's urgent request to the Europeans to bring Turkey into the EU. Turkey is a key ally in any war coalition against Saddam, but the American purpose is wider, namely to secure the absorption of a moderate Muslim state into the political organisation of western Christendom, which is one reason why France, Germany and Spain, to name but three, are unenthusiastic, though Britain, as ever, is taking the American view. Wolfowitz's argument is important, and   the case was well made - but this wasn't what the audience assembled by the International Institute for Strategic Studies had come to hear.  On Iraq, he didn't say enough for them. And Iraq presents an unusual British problem. The war proposition is one on which our prime minister is well ahead not only of his own party but also of the network of defence intellectuals, politicos and mandarins assembled by the IISS. Here was a group of non-Labourish, often rather conservative figures waiting to be persuaded out of their scepticism by a famous prince of darkness. But I think he failed to satisfy them, because he was talking with unnatural reticence.   He did make a vivid case for pre-emptive strikes against the possessor of so many weapons of mass destruction who has a record of putting them to criminally hideous use against his own people. Taking the 3,000 victims of 9/11 as a benchmark, were we to "wait until 30,000 Americans, or 300,000 or perhaps three million had been killed by WMD before we felt free to act against them"? John F Kennedy's conduct of the Cuban missile crisis, facing down such threats, was Wolfowitz's model. Forty years on, in a world without state-based enemies, "imminent" threats were so indecipherable, it seemed, that any hypothetical threat now justified pre-emption.  The issue he did not address in detail was how the Iraqi threat connected with the war on existing terrorism as experienced in New York, Bali and Mombasa. Here was the hawkish disappointment of the day. After all, Wolfowitz is leader of the school that says the link between Saddam and al-Qaida justifies a war if and when the inspection process fails, yet he produced no evidence of a connection even after 15 months to find it. Even at this time, in front of this audience, he did no more than insist that the US military could fight on many fronts, disregarding the argument that bothers Europeans, including many well-informed Brits. To them the issue isn't whether both wars can be fought simultaneously, but whether fighting Iraq won't enhance rather than defeat the forces available to al-Qaida.  From these encounters, the lecture and the conversation, I draw two conclusions. One is that the US has no doubt about the virtue of its cause, as seen not only at home but also in Iraq. This confirmed what I kept hearing in Washington. Many important people there have a clear belief that the Iraqi street, not to mention the Iraqi middle class, is simply waiting the signal to rise up and welcome their liberators. Officials at the National Security Council are counting the civil servants they're quite sure will turn in a trice to run the country the American way.  The official American line is, in a way, simplistic. Perhaps it has to be. Americans understand the war may be hard to win, especially if it reduces to an urban battle for every street in Baghdad. But they cannot believe they might be less popular than the regime they will replace. The sense of a democratic future for Iraq, its 23 million educated citizens cohering round a new prosperity and being transformed from the pariah to the role model in the Middle East, reveals the power of optimistic fantasy to sweep aside all difficulties.  My second conclusion is darker. When I asked Paul Wolfowitz whether we should be preparing for a war the UN did not bless, he avoided the question. He said, as per routine, that there was an outside chance Saddam would see the light, and let inspection lead to the peaceful dismembering of his weaponry. But he doesn't believe it is going to happen. Nor does any American I've met anywhere near the administration. They are going through the necessary motions of peace. They might even believe what they used to reject, that regime-change could occur that way. The hawk yesterday talked a subtle game, submissive to politicians "above my pay grade". But in September at the UN, he only lost a battle. The war is another matter.