Washington ? In the end it came down to George W. Bush’s code of moral geopolitics and the deceptively swift pace of U.S. military deployments into the Persian Gulf region this winter. Nothing else counted for much on the road to launching the second American war on Iraq.

Certainly not the U.N. weapons inspections and months of hyperventilation at the Security Council. They produced the predictable ambiguity and confusion that Bush sliced through with missiles aimed directly at Saddam Hussein. Bush was not about to let Hans Blix make war or peace decisions for America.

And certainly not the administration’s intramural, petty sparring over Iraq that Bush tolerated while keeping his own counsel. Participants in the policy-making process say that there was never a full-scale discussion of whether the United States should go to war against Saddam in the Principals’ Meetings of the National Security Council, which brings together the secretaries of state and defense and other key officials.

Instead, the “decision,” if that is the right word, emerged piecemeal early last summer from what had become a war cabinet of two — Bush and Vice President Cheney. A few officials outside the White House spotted the direction that Bush and Cheney were taking in July and went to work on the best ways to conduct a campaign that they understood was coming absent a miracle.

Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Colin Powell were among those officials. Rumsfeld was operating from a position of strength. He was both friend and ally to Cheney. His shadow was in the room when the president and vice president talked about Iraq. And in the end he would have the tools to make a strategic U.S. retreat at the last minute virtually unthinkable.

Powell, still uncomfortable with the president and his policies, inserted himself into a Bush-Cheney dialogue with a now well-publicized Aug. 5 dinner presentation to Bush and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice. But Powell was reacting by then to a train already leaving the station, trying to influence the route it would take, perhaps as a way of modifying the eventual destination.

It was not until December, when the Iraqis filed a fantasy-filled, insulting 12,000-page weapons declaration to the Security Council, when Powell finally concluded that war was inevitable and appropriate. That is the conclusion I draw from his own public utterances as well as the impressions he left on U.S. and foreign officials who observed him in policy-making councils at the time.

Even then Powell’s optimistic manner and words seem to have convinced some of his wishful colleagues that he still opposed the war and would be able to block it if they weighed in heavily. “There will be no war,” one foreign minister told me flatly last winter after talking to Powell. But that was before French and German confrontational tactics enraged Powell almost as much as Iraq’s duplicity, and confirmed his metamorphosis into a hawk.

Rumsfeld, on the other hand, had a clear field in the decentralized policy environment that Bush encourages. By late February, the Pentagon had deployed over 200,000 troops into the theater with a speed and purpose that caught Rumsfeld’s bureaucratic rivals off-balance.

“I’m not sure we realized how fast and big this build-up was getting until after it had essentially happened,” one official says now. “That helped shut down the clock on inspections and other options for the president.”

Perhaps. But Bush seems to have needed little persuasion or squeezing by Rumsfeld or by Cheney, who took part in the 1991 decision to let Saddam survive and who is known to believe that this is a rare chance in public life to correct a serious mistake.

Bush had stayed aloof from the formal policy review on Iraq that was initiated in early 2001, while Cheney took a keen interest in it. But after 9-11 the president quickly developed his own black-and-white view of the unique evil and the dangers presented by the Iraqi regime.

Throughout the long months of debate and preparation, as U.S. policy seemed to zigzag and U.N.-mounted obstacles to regime change proliferated, one thing was always clear: In the end, Bush would have to make up his mind on the basis of incomplete and conflicting information and divided advice from within his own administration. That seemed to bother him less than it would have most other politicians I have known.

“This comes down to this president’s character and his instincts,” one Iraq hawk who knows the president well told me months ago. “I’m not worried about the outcome.”