WASHINGTON -- The plotters are meeting down at the Ponderosa today.

They waited to huddle in Crawford until the flower child Colin Powell had gone up to the Hamptons, ensconced with the white-wine-swilling toffs scorned by the president.

With the diffident general brunching with the Dean & DeLuca set, Cheney, Rummy, Condi and W. can get down to bidness on the ranch, scheming to smoke Saddam.

We used to worry about a military coup against civilian authority. Now we worry about a civilian coup against military authority.

It's the reverse of the classic movie "Seven Days in May," about gung-ho generals trying to wrest power from an "appeasing" president. In "Thirty-One Days in August," gung-ho presidential advisers try to wrest power away from "appeasing" generals.

In the 1964 movie, the generals' code for their military coup was a bet on the Preakness. In the 2002 version, W. signaled his civilian coup by telling an A.P. reporter his vacation reading was "Supreme Command," a new book by Eliot A. Cohen, a conservative who favors ousting Saddam. In his book, Mr. Cohen attacks the Powell Doctrine and argues that civilian leaders should not defer to "the fundamental caution" of whiny generals on grand strategy or use of force.

Tired of the inhibitions of the retired generals — Mr. Powell, Brent Scowcroft and Wesley Clark — and unretired generals in the Joint Chiefs; tired of the whisper campaigns in the hallways of the Pentagon and State Department that a rush to war in Iraq will weaken America's war on terror; tired of Republican resistance on the Hill — the hawks flew to Texas to strut their hawkishness.

The White House denied that the president was gathering his war council to talk about war, to figure out when and how to employ all the hardware that's been pre-positioned in Saddam's neighborhood.

After all, they pointed out, Gen. Tommy Franks isn't coming. And General Powell isn't coming. A spokesman for Mr. Powell said he wasn't going because it was a meeting about the military budget.

Never mind that the military budget is money that may level Iraq.

Ari Fleischer said the meeting was about military "transformation." Yeah. They're going to transform Baghdad into "Hey, dad, that dude is history."

There were a few token uniforms at the coup kaffeeklatsch. But except for Rummy, the Whack-Iraq tribe — including W., Cheney, Condi, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle — have scant backgrounds in the military, as their military critics mutter.

The military types in the Pesky Questions tribe fret that it would be smarter to go after the low-hanging fruit in the war on terror first — Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, Indonesia, Colombia. They worry that the Whack-Iraq'ers are too sanguine that our new weapons or a Special Forces option will prevent Saddam from lobbing his chemical weapons at our men and women in uniform. They fear that Rummy's belief that America can go in light, fast and easy is futuristic nonsense.

But the Cheney-Rummy-Condi Axis of Anti-Evil believes in unilateralism so fervently that it is prepared to proceed unilaterally without its own military. If the Pentagon is not prepared to get with the program, they can always parachute Wolfowitz into Baghdad with a license to kill.

Cheney & Co. are clearly regrouping to catch the patriotic wave of the 9/11 anniversary, drawing fresh momentum for pre-empting terror in the Middle East.

But they're not being smart by being secret. They have the conspiratorial air of embattled sectarians, of a besieged cult, treating skeptics as appeasers and legitimate questions as failures of patriotism. They are in exclusive possession of the truth and the whole world is against them.

They have forgotten that planning a war is not justifying a war. The plans must be covert but the justifications must be overt.

The hawks offer a potpourri of reasons for war, but they don't have the time or the patience to persuade the American public that it really matters.

If the Iraqi danger is as large and clear as they say it is, their explanations should also be large and clear.

The problem with the Bush administration is that its bully pulpit is all bully and no pulpit.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company

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