Stardate 20030125.1428

(Captain's log): The BBC reports:

United States Secretary of State Colin Powell says the Bush administration will "patiently" assess the first full report by United Nations weapons inspectors in Iraq.

... The US Secretary of State made it clear the Bush administration would not rush to make a decision, after chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix reports to the security council on Monday.

"We certainly will patiently examine the report, consult with our friends and allies," he said on Saturday.

"I'm sure the president will talk to fellow heads of state and government and I will be consulting with the ministers of the Security Council."

The Washington Post reports:

While making clear it believes Iraq has already violated last November's U.N. Security Council resolution, the Bush administration will acquiesce to continued U.N. inspections there, at least for the next several weeks, according to U.S. and diplomatic sources.

There is no expectation that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will decide to cooperate more fully with weapons inspectors, and the administration is unlikely to announce any formal retreat as it strives to keep the pressure on Baghdad, sources said. But requests from Britain, the need to build more public and political support at home and abroad, and a military schedule that is a month or more away from full deployment have combined to temper thoughts of attempting an earlier inspection cutoff.

"Events will drive the timetable," one administration official said. Beginning with the inspectors' report to the council on Iraqi cooperation Monday, followed by a subsequent, less formal report now scheduled for Feb. 14, British and U.S. officials believe it will become increasingly apparent to a council majority that, even without the discovery of an Iraqi "smoking gun," continued inspections will serve no useful disarmament purpose.

CNN reports:

Colin Powell sent strong signals Saturday that the United States would wait until after U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq submitted their report to the U.N. Security Council on Monday before making any decision on whether or not to lead a military coalition against Saddam Hussein.

"There are steps that we plan to go through, methodically, deliberately," Powell said during his visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

But Powell added, "There will be ultimately an end, I believe, to the patience of the international community."

No sooner did I post an article where I made clear that I was sure that war was coming, sooner rather than later, than it seems as if the Bush administration is backing out again. I confess that I find these reports deeply troubling, and I'm somewhat worried. I sat down this morning over at Starbucks and applied my "engineering spidey sense" to the situation and tried to construct as many scenarios as I could to explain what was going on with this. I described that this way one time:

When you've worked as an engineer long enough, you gain a sort of spidey-sense about what other engineers do, a kind of intuition which permits you to work backwards from results to causes. When you see something which at first seems inexplicable, you can get inside the heads of the guys who designed it, and try to figure out what might have driven them to do what they did. You make the basic assumption that they're not incompetent fools and that if they did something strange then there must have been a good reason why. And long experience with engineering will give you an intuition about the kinds of things which might have driven them to do what they did.

I can do that pretty well with other engineers because they generally tend to think the way I do, and have the same kind of deep commitment to practicality that I tend to have. As such, it is more difficult for me to do the same thing with politicians and diplomats and bureaucrats. But we'll give it a try.

The first thing to notice is that most of these reports were based on statements by Colin Powell made at the Davos meeting. Powell has always been the most important member of the administration who has favored diplomacy and inspections and multilateralism and cooperation with allies while opposing the use of military force, and he's also in the position right now at Davos to be our point man and to have to be on the receiving end of concentrated direct pressure by nearly everyone influential who opposes the war.

I came up with a number of different explanations, not all of which are mutually exclusive. So here, in no particular order, are the more plausible ones. I write them all declaratively but read them in subjunctive mood (i.e. "the administration plans" as "the administration might be planning" etc.):

It's disinformation (aimed at the Iraqis). The administration actually plans on starting a week from now but wants the Iraqi government to believe that war has actually been delayed until March so that the real attack comes as a surprise. It's notable that at about the s