About 100 U.S. and British warplanes attacked Iraq last night in the biggest single operation in four years. According to the London Telegraph, the raid on major western air defense installations looks like it was designed to destroy air defenses in order to allow Special Forces helicopters from Jordan or Saudi Arabia to hunt down Scud missiles ahead of a full-scale invasion. Meanwhile, Pentagon officials say the Army has recently doubled the size of its war stocks in Kuwait to accommodate a little-noticed expansion of U.S. armored forces at a base near the Iraqi border. Army Secretary Thomas White, of Enron scandal fame, said the Army is ready for whatever action President Bush chooses. And Vice President Dick Cheney and CIA Director George Tenet gave congressional leaders a top-secret briefing on why the U.S. would attack Iraq.

President Bush took his case for war with Iraq to the heartlands yesterday, telling rallies in Kentucky and Indiana that “history has called us into action” to topple the Iraqi leader. He plans to call the leaders of Russia, France and China today. Those nations all hold the power of veto on the U.N. Security Council. He’s scheduled to meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David Saturday. Blair told the BBC Britain is willing to pay a “blood price” in its special relationship with the U.S. and will be there when the shooting starts. Bush is also scheduled to address the U.N. General Assembly on September 12.

As the Bush administration’s war preparations gain momentum, NATO officials say NATO will not participate in any preemptive strike on Iraq, because offensive action runs contrary to the founding principles of the North Atlantic alliance. And the foreign ministers from 20 Arab nations ended two days of talks in Cairo. They issued a resolution declaring their “total rejection of the threat of aggression on Arab nations, in particular Iraq, reaffirming that these threats to the security and safety of any Arab country are considered a threat to Arab national security.” The Arab League chief, Amr Moussa, warned that a war would open the gates of hell for the Middle East. The Cairo meeting is in sharp contrast to the broad Arab and international participation in the 1991 Gulf War to evict Iraq from its oil-rich neighbor Kuwait.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai survived an assassination attempt in Kandahar just hours yesterday after a car bomb killed 25 people 300 miles away in Kabul. Shots fired into Karzai’s car came within inches of the president and injured the governor of Kandahar. Afghan officials immediately blamed al-Qaeda and the Taliban and said the attacks appear to have been timed around the anniversary of the September 11 attacks in the United States. But the officials acknowledged they have no evidence. The attacks follow reports that remnants of the Taliban and al-Qaeda have been reorganizing and rearming. But they also come amid growing anti-American sentiment in the country following the killings of hundreds of civilians in raids by U.S. warplanes.

The New York Times reports there have been growing fears that a warlord who once destroyed half of Kabul could be again about to open new attacks. Hekmatyar had been in exile in Iran during the Taliban years but returned recently to the Kabul region and vowed to join al-Qaeda and the Taliban in a new jihad. The New York Times did not mention that Hekmatyar was the top recipient of covert U.S. and Saudi funds in the 1980s. International peacekeeping forces operate only in Kabul, leaving Kandahar and other cities to warlords. U.S. troops do not participate in peacekeeping operations. For months, the Pentagon has ignored repeated calls from the Afghan government around the world to expand the peacekeeping forces.