Someone tell the President that there is a war on. Oh, I know he knows that American troops are patrolling the Afghani mountains, jungle trails in the Philippines and are poised for battle on the Iraqi border. It isn’t that war I’m talking about. I know that he is watching carefully the running gun fight in the West Bank and Gaza. I know he is aware, if only dimly, of our continuing occupation in the Balkans. I’m not talking about those wars.

What he may not be fully aware of is the continuing fight between two powerful strongmen waged under the political radar. It is a guerilla campaign between an experienced military commander and a ruthless political manipulator with control of a military establishment. It’s the war between Secretary of State Colin Powell and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

In times of conflict the Administration needs to talk with one voice – to our adversaries; to our allies; and to the American people. You can’t build support for a war, let alone wage one, until you can lay out in clear and unequivocal terms the cause that is driving the conflict; a comprehensive commitment to the engagement; and the objective sought by crossing the Rubicon to war.

The Administration has been speaking with a Tower of Babel full of voices with an encyclopedia of reasons why we need to go to war. Each day brings a new message and a new voice. The objective is unclear, the commitment is unclear and the reasons for going to war shift as the wind blows the sand into a new configuration. Is it Iraqi disarmament? Is it an effective inspection system? Is it regime change? Is it, “he tried to kill my father, after all!” Are we committed to a military solution? A diplomatic one? Or are we going to continue to rely on bluster and bluff while we look for someone with a 5 cent bullet or a travel agent for Saddam Hussein?

Nowhere is it more evident than in the Administrations failure to find an answer to the question of what comes after Saddam. That is the fight in which the State and Defense Departments are now engaged, as Judith Miller writes in today’s New York Times. “In August, the administration sponsored a meeting of the six main Iraqi opposition groups, trying to help them establish a united front. Yet, according to the opposition groups and analysts on Iraq, this effort has been undercut by clashes between the Pentagon, on one side, and the State Department and Central Intelligence Agency on the other, over the role of the Iraqi National Congress.”

If the President is going to lead he has to speak with one voice and one message. That is the only path to uniting the American public, our Allies and the rest of the world to support a Second Iraqi War. The poker hand has been dealt, the bets are down and it is time to lay the cards out on the table.