Washington ? Saber rattling in Washington and defiant warnings from Baghdad may be the early stages of political and psychological maneuvering that would be a prelude to a second Gulf War.

Even administration officials are talking in terms of a postwar Iraq.

“What’s going to come afterwards,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said last week, is not only going to benefit ordinary Iraqis but will also “remove a great danger” to Americans.

“I think it willzq be another act of liberation,” he said.

Some outside the administration see a deliberate psychological aim behind such talk.

“We may already be executing a plan,” says retired Army Gen. Fred Woerner, a former commander in chief of U.S. forces in South America. “Are we involved in a preliminary psychological dimension of causing Iraq to do something” to justify a U.S. attack or to make concessions? he asks.

“Somebody knows, but I sure don’t.”

Although the U.S. military has thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in the Gulf area and theoretically could launch an attack at any time, there are no strong signs that war is imminent.

Bush, while talking tough about Iraq, has not yet fully consulted America’s skeptical allies, enlisted political support from Congress or prepared the American public for the risks inherent in a new war.

Anthony Cordesman, a Middle East expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, believes Iraq knows it cannot win a conventional war against the United States, whose military strength has in many ways increased since the 1991 Gulf War while Iraq’s has slipped or decayed. Therefore, it will search for ways to deny Arab support for direct U.S. military action, he said.

“The key battle is already under way and is largely political,” Cordesman wrote in an assessment early this month.

“Iraq’s best strategy is to defuse the political momentum for a major U.S. attack,” he wrote. Iraq’s recent accommodations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait may be part of such a strategy. Baghdad has pledged to respect Kuwait’s sovereignty and to restore full relations with the country it invaded in 1990.

Saddam is publicly defiant. In a speech July 17 marking Iraq’s national day, he said foreign schemes to overthrow him would fail.

“The wind will blow away foreign rattling as the noise of an evil tyrant,” he said.