Admittedly we've had a few distractions of late, what with North Carolina's efforts to avoid freezing in the dark, but it's becoming hard not to notice, even in this season of peace, that . . . oops, before long we may be fighting a war.

Saddam Hussein's government has turned over what is supposed to be a definitive catalog of Iraq's most sensitive weapons programs, arguing all the while that it no longer has or indeed never did have any such weapons -- i.e., chemicals, germs, nukes.

The Bush administration, having taken an initial gander, responds with something along the lines of "bull-loney." The White House already had as much as promised to unleash our forces no matter what Baghdad disclosed or didn't disclose about the weapons, since it is convinced Iraq has got 'em or soon will. Now we'll comb through the 12,000 pages of documents to try to catch Saddam & Co. in a blatant enough lie to convince our pals in the United Nations to go along.

If they don't? No sweat -- we'll just take care of this nasty little business by ourselves. And while we're on the subject (say the brain trusters at 1600 Penn.), let's pick up the pace on those Persian Gulf deployments and make those war games look nice and snappy.

So what's to be made of this seemingly inexorable slide toward Desert Storm Revisited (or perhaps Desert Storm Squared)? Should we be fixing to raise a mighty cry of protest over the prospect of war even as we redouble our efforts to keep Saddam pinned down and penned up where he can't hurt us? Or should we regard the whole pending venture -- to chop off the monster's head -- as unfortunate but unavoidable?

As one might imagine, this boils down to one of the hairiest policy dilemmas in many a moon. Guidance, however, is at hand. A most helpful effort to open and sort the can of worms is made by Brian Urquhart, former U.S. undersecretary-general, in the current New York Review of Books, as he weighs one version of the argument that America must send in the troops.

That version is Kenneth M. Pollack's, in his recent book "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." Pollack is a former top expert on Iraq and Persian Gulf affairs with the National Security Council (in the Clinton White House) and with the CIA. He concludes, not with any sense of jubilation, that 1) peaceful means cannot keep Saddam Hussein from following through on his plans to acquire nuclear weapons, 2) a nuclear-armed Saddam for a host of reasons is an unacceptable threat to U.S. interests, and 3) a full-scale invasion, at some point before that threat becomes real, is our only prudent choice.

Pollack doesn't minimize the dangers -- foreseeing as many as 10,000 U.S. combat deaths, or at least 500 to 1,000 under the best of circumstances -- or the complications. But he views the risks of not invading -- nuclear war fomented by Saddam, or his nuclear zapping of Persian Gulf oil production -- as far greater than the risks of going ahead with it.

Urquhart treats Pollack's analysis with respect, and says that whether from action or inaction, the risks are "extremely hard to assess." Certainly, he doesn't take Saddam lightly, describing him as "the industrialized world's worst nightmare, an aggressive, unpredictable, psychotic dictator in the midst of the world's most important oil-producing region."

Yet, perhaps as it befits his United Nations background, Urquhart is sensitive to all that could go wrong in moving to take Saddam out, especially if the United States and Britain act alone.

The list is painfully familiar, but no less formidable for that: Distracting and dividing the international effort to combat terrorism. Drawing new recruits to al-Qaeda. Convincing Muslims that America actually is at war with Islam, prompting widespread retaliation. Destabilizing other governments in the region, including nuclear-armed Pakistan. Imposing enormous costs on the U.S. economy. Increasing the chance that Iraqi stocks of weapons of mass destruction would fall into the hands of terrorists. Prompting a cornered Saddam to use those weapons himself.

At least, as Urquhart notes, there remains a U.N. framework for gauging and coping with the Iraqi threat. If countries could cooperate in keeping nuclear materials out of Saddam's hands, he suggests, perhaps a crisis could be averted. But if a war must be fought, it must be a multilateral effort to avoid consequences he rates as "catastrophic."

That would seem to be sound, pragmatic advice. And fateful decisions about war-making need to have a pragmatic basis. Ideally, they also should flow from our understanding of what's right in an ethical sense. Keeping Saddam Hussein from placing the entire Middle East under the threat of nuclear blackmail has a reasonably ethical ring to it. Protecting oil fields on which our economy and lifestyle depend? For now, let's just say that cheap gasoline is a darn expensive thing.

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