One day in mid-september, the phone rang in the Washington office of a former U.S. government official with close ties to the Iraqi exile community. On the other end of the line was an old Iraqi friend, now living in Europe, whom the former official had met when he was stationed in the Middle East in the 1990s. There were some pleasantries; then the Iraqi cut to the chase. In the past two months, he said, four senior Iraqi security officials had contacted him and asked if he could help them establish lines of communication to the U.S. so that if war started, they could be on the winning side. The former official had contacted two old colleagues, now at the White House and the CIA, and put them in touch with the Iraqi middleman. Listen to government officials in Washington and London, chat with members of the alphabet soup of Iraqi exile groups, and you can come away thinking that such conversations are a dime a dozen. And they may be. In small ways and big ones, the U.S. and its allies are working like termites to undermine the rickety foundations of Saddam's rule. As the U.N. weapons inspectors started their work inside Iraq and President George W. Bush conferred with possible coalition partners at meetings in Prague and Moscow, it was easy to miss a story taking place behind the scenes. Whatever timetable the U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraqi disarmament may imply, and whatever Saddam may or may not do to cough up his weapons of mass destruction, people in the know are behaving as if a war to unseat the regime in Baghdad has already begun.
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