Washington ? The Pentagon is now within eight weeks of being ready to launch a sustained military campaign to overthrow Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and destroy his weapons of horror. The time has arrived for President Bush and his aides to cast in iron the war aims that will guide and justify this campaign and to state them clearly to the nation and world.

The tip-off that the Defense Department is moving into its final phase of planning and preparation comes from a decision to begin military training of Iraqi exile forces and dissidents who can be spirited out of Iraq. The limited training will take six to eight weeks to complete, military planners say.

The initial effort to prepare 3,000 to 5,000 Iraqi troops to help keep order once their country is liberated and to train other Iraqis was one of the last items on the administration’s checklist of preparatory steps. Another was funding an intelligence collection program run by the opposition. U.S. military commanders have been understandably cautious about turning over weapons, training and spying support to foreigners they ultimately do not control. They postponed action as long as they could.

These tactical military steps occur as diplomatic negotiations on a new Security Council resolution to govern arms inspections conclude at the United Nations. There, too, the deck is being cleared to permit action by January.

The U.N. bargaining in New York has actually been a disguised offer by the United States to allow France and Russia to share in shaping the war aims of the campaign to come. The bold, elegantly coercive U.S. approach has provoked agonizing and ambivalence in Paris and Moscow about signing on or being left out.

The bargaining over a U.N. mandate illustrates a crucial difference between tactics and strategy that has been muddied in the U.S. domestic debate. The big powers argue over how to get to a destination (that’s tactics) as a way of deciding what the final destination will be (that’s strategy).

France and Russia fight for rules they claim would reduce Iraq’s biological, chemical and nuclear weapons capabilities to manageable proportions by putting those programs back under international supervision while leaving in place in Baghdad an authoritarian regime dominated by the country’s military and its Sunni Arab minority.

It is claimed that this arrangement would best hold Iraq together. It would upset neither the region’s (presumed) balances of power nor its commercial patterns, which were established between the Western powers and Moscow on the one hand and the Sunni-dominated merchant classes of the Middle East on the other.

Bush has used political shorthand to outline a very different set of desirable consequences “regime change,” democracy in the Middle East, etc. The conclusion of the U.N. debate will permit Bush to refine and recast those ideas as realistic, sustainable war aims in Iraq. He must identify them for the American public as the only acceptable outcomes.

U.S. military action cannot guarantee that democracy will take root in Iraq, much less the Arab world. It does have a reasonable prospect of dramatically improving the lives of the Iraqi people by giving them a chance to live without a deeply rooted daily fear of losing life, health, family or freedom on the whim of proud murderers the ubiquitous dread that Washingtonians barely tasted over the past three weeks as they were hunted by a sniper.

The removal of the Baathist regime should therefore be an act of humanitarian intervention, similar to military actions in Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor and to some extent in Afghanistan a year ago. Freeing a nation of hostages in this uniquely savage case is a realistic war aim. Achieving nirvana in Baghdad is not.

Administration postwar planning has begun to focus on promoting a federal system to give Iraq’s Shiite Arab majority and Sunni Kurdish minority a stake in a new democratic system. A political outcome that reassures Turkey that there will be no independent Kurdistan is an important U.S. goal.

So is the removal of the infrastructure of weapons of mass destruction. This can be accomplished only with a fully cooperative Baghdad government that is willing to reach peaceful accommodations with Iran and its other neighbors. A redrawn regional security policy that includes new U.S. honesty and firmness with Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel’s Ariel Sharon must also emerge from a decision to go back to war with Iraq.

A countdown to the dawning of a new political order in the greater Middle East or of unimaginable global disaster if U.S. war aims are not properly framed and then achieved has begun. It is measured not in months or years, but in fast onrushing weeks.