WASHINGTON, Feb 11 (Reuters) - President George W. Bush seems determined to attack Iraq, but his ultimate war aims remain cloudy and have been hotly debated both within and outside the administration.

Officially, if the United States attacks Iraq, it will be for the purpose of rooting out and destroying Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's supposed nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

But this itself represents a change. Last summer, before Bush decided to take his case to the United Nations, senior administration officials, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, were unequivocally advocating "regime change" in Iraq, administration code for the forced removal of Saddam
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Critics and backers of the war have put forward a wide range of possible motivations, ranging from asserting U.S. power and primacy to spreading democracy in the Arab world to wresting control of Iraqi oil reserves to satisfying Bush's psychological need to finish a job his father left undone by eliminating Saddam and his government.

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"Regime change in Iraq is clearly a major objective and there are other broader aims that are even less likely to be publicly avowed, such as a reordering of the Middle East as a whole," he said.

"However the real, underlying aim in my opinion is to establish that the United States can do anything it wants anywhere, any time. That sends a message of intimidation to other governments that may want to challenge the United States such as North Korea and Iran," Khalidi said.

Defeating Iraq would therefore signal, as columnist Bill Keller wrote in the New York Times on Saturday, "a determination to keep America an unchallenged superpower, a willingness to forcibly disarm any country that poses a gathering threat and an unwillingness to be constrained by treaties of international institutions that don't suit us perfectly."
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Whatever the original motivations behind confronting Iraq were, many commentators now believe that Bush would lose credibility in the Middle East and the world if he backed down now and Saddam would be seen as a winner. Thus, a new war aim is to avoid looking weak.

"It should be obvious that if the Bush administration now fails to go to war against Saddam Hussein, we will lose enormous face throughout the region," wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht in the conservative Weekly Standard.

"President Bush has defined himself and America by his axis-of-evil, regime change policy towards Iraq. Without a successful war to remove Saddam, we will return to the pre-9/11 pattern of timidity that Osama bin Laden so effectively underscored in his writings and speeches," he said.

» Reuters AlertNet - U.S. war aims in Iraq hotly debated but unclear