Washington ? Now that President Bush has the authority from Congress to wage war against Saddam Hussein, the question is not when he will do so, but whether.

Lest we forget, the president has always said that he would prefer not to go to war against Saddam Hussein, and that if there were some means of achieving American aims in Iraq “regime change” and dismantling weapons of mass destruction he would welcome it. The universal assumption has been that this is largely political talk, something that the president must say to appear diplomatic. But if there is one thing we know about George W. Bush, it is that he is inclined to say what he means. I am happy to take him at his word: That is, President Bush regards an invasion of Iraq as a last, not first, resort.

This leaves two intriguing possibilities; and the president, as he tends to do, is leaving his options open. The first option is the one defined last week by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who said that the primary issue is not regime change but disarmament. That is to say, if the United Nations can impose some sort of arms-inspection regime that would satisfy the Bush administration, the status of Saddam Hussein might be irrelevant.

To be sure, this enrages those who are eager to start bombing Baghdad, but it is not entirely fanciful. If the American president appears ready and willing to go to war, and if the United States can assemble a broad-based coalition in support of its aims, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the officers seated around Saddam Hussein’s table perhaps even Saddam Hussein himself might be inspired to save their skins by readmitting U.N. inspectors and allowing them unfettered access.

This leads to another possibility, suggested by the president’s press secretary at the moment Secretary Powell was speaking: regime change from within. Naturally, that would require one or more of Saddam Hussein’s henchmen either to kill the Iraqi dictator outright, or persuade him that retirement and exile are preferable to death, or a war-crimes trial, at U.S. hands.

Once again, the war hawks dismiss this alternative out of hand, and perhaps they are right: Saddam Hussein has foiled palace coups in the past, and executed everyone in sight, including relatives. But even a police state, perhaps especially a police state, has its factions, cabals and ambitious courtiers. And the United States has a recent history of escorting dictators into exile: Ferdinand Marcos, of the Philippines, in the Reagan administration; Raoul Cedras, of Haiti, in the Clinton administration. Even Uganda’s Idi Amin resides peacefully in Saudi Arabia.

It is unlikely that the secretary of state and the White House press secretary are merely thinking out loud: We have to assume that the president has such tactics in mind. And what better way to set the stage than to stick to the present script? When the Iranian regime took U.S. diplomats hostage in 1979, Jimmy Carter went to considerable lengths to assure the world that the American response would be “moderate” (his word) and that the United States would not be rushed into punitive action against Tehran.

This had the inevitable effect of hardening Iranian defiance. George W. Bush is doing the opposite: By every means at his disposal, he has made it clear that an invasion of Iraq is not just possible but likely. Saddam Hussein may be evil, but he is not delusional.

And yet, having convinced Congress, and made the United Nations an instrument of his purposes, the president faces a deadline: At some point, perhaps this winter, one side in the Bush-Saddam confrontation must yield. That, in turn, leads to a new series of questions.

If the United States invades and conquers Iraq, will it satisfy itself with the destruction of Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship and his doomsday weapons? Or will President Bush embrace the visions of the loony Right: the imposition of an American-approved regime in Iraq, followed by invasion and subjugation of our traditional ally Saudi Arabia, as well as Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority?

For that matter, if the violation of U.N. resolutions is our new diplomatic touchstone, can this be reconciled with the fact that, following Iraq, the worst violators of U.N. resolutions are Israel and Turkey? Perhaps George W. Bush is several steps ahead of us all. Having disposed of Saddam Hussein, and preserved the Mideast from his weapons of mass destruction, the United States would be ideally positioned to impose the kind of Mideast settlement we claim to support: withdrawal of Israeli forces and colonial settlements from the West Bank and Gaza, followed by the establishment of a Palestinian state and an end to terrorism grounded in Arab grievances.