If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were at all superstitious, he might regard what happened to him last week as a cautionary signal. For three days, Rumsfeld went without a brace to support his surgically repaired thumb, only to have his hand and wrist swell and become very painful again. On the morning I saw him, he resumed wearing the protective leather wrap and acknowledged that he had been rushing things.

If the gods were sending him a message to slow down his preparations for a war with Iraq, Rumsfeld was not hearing it. Nothing he said in the next 45 minutes suggested any doubts on the part of the man who may in the near future have to order American troops to carry out a presidential decision to oust Saddam Hussein.

Earlier that morning, he had met with a couple dozen members of Congress to urge them to support administration policy. “Their questions were good,” he said, “and I’m sure (were) coming from their constituents.” He took with him John McLaughlin, the No. 2 man at the CIA, in order to deal with the previous day’s news stories reporting that McLaughlin had said that there was little likelihood Saddam would launch a chemical or biological weapons attack unless the United States invaded.

Rumsfeld said McLaughlin had told the legislators that the quoted excerpt of his testimony was “a cartoon” fragment of 200 pages of national intelligence estimates and that any calculation of Iraqi intentions was uncertain. Then Rumsfeld pulled out a pencil and drew me a simple chart a downward sloping line tracing the erosion of Iraq’s conventional military strength in the decade since the Gulf War, and an upward sloping line showing its growing store of WMD weapons of mass destruction.

Given Saddam’s brutal and bloody history, Rumsfeld said, “the stronger he gets, the greater the likelihood he will attempt to use that strength.”

This operating assumption that capacity is equal to intent would explain why President Bush has consistently argued that “time is not on our side,” and that pre-emptive action is not only justified but necessary.

If Saddam sees himself in danger of being removed by an American force, would he not then use WMD against our troops? “I think that’s a possibility our military has to consider,” Rumsfeld said. “But he can’t use them himself. He has to have other people use them, and that means somebody has to obey orders. And already word has gone out that anybody who goes near those weapons or follows such orders … would be tracked down and charged with war crimes.”

What is true of those commanders, Rumsfeld said, is equally true of much of Saddam’s army “a military of uneven loyalty” which saw mass surrenders during the Gulf War. They too would have to weigh the costs of resistance should America attack. The hard core might well be concentrated in Baghdad and other cities, and “urban warfare is not anything anyone would want to get involved with if you could avoid it. There are people thinking carefully about what you might do.”

All this implies the belief that an American force might expect help or at least passivity from all but “the clique at the top,” because Iraqis are really “hostages” of the regime, not supporters.

Rumsfeld sounds equally optimistic about the prospects of enlisting significant allied help, if and when Bush decides to use force, and about the shape of a post-Saddam Iraq. “Keeping that country together is critically important,” as is assuring that it is disarmed and democratic, he said.

Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq has a ready source of wealth in its oil reserves, Rumsfeld said, “but it would take some time” to get it back on its feet. He demurred when I used the word “occupation,” but later reports from the Pentagon suggested a military government might be required until an acceptable indigenous government was ready. Germany and Japan are the examples Rumsfeld suggested and we have military forces there more than half a century after World War II ended.

Overall, Rumsfeld left me with the impression that he was aware of the risks of war with Iraq, but confident they could be handled. He had also been confident he didn’t need the hand brace any longer, but that error of judgment was readily reversed. When I left, I wished him good luck and was careful to shake the other hand.