It concluded that the Kremlin was willing to spend the Soviet Union into penury to win the nuclear arms race.Whether the hardliners were right may be disputed, and in any event it was the Reagan-era Pentagon that spent the Soviet Union into the ground. But consider some of Team B’s members: Mr Rumsfeld (then, as now, Secretary of Defence), Paul Wolfowitz, now his deputy, and Lewis (Scooter) Libby, chief of staff to Mr Cheney, arguably the most influential vice-President in American history. Team B had other important outriders, notably Richard Perle, who was then a senior aide of the ferocious anti-Communist, Senator Henry Jackson.In the Reagan administration, Mr Perle became an assistant Secretary of Defence, known as the “Prince of Darkness” for his opposition to nuclear arms control. Today he heads the defence policy board, an important independent advisory panel to the Pentagon.

Mr Perle’s old prot?, Douglas Feith, holds the Pentagon’s third-ranking post, of under-Secretary of Defence for Policy. All are instinctive hawks, who insist America must not underestimate the terrorist threat now, any more than the Soviet threat a quarter of a century ago. They believe that to unchain American power is to release a unique force for human advancement. They also believe that in 1991, George Bush senior made a grievous mistake in not going all the way to Baghdad and finishing off Saddam Hussein there and then. Of them, none is more fervent in this conviction than Mr Wolfowitz.Mr Wolfowitz, like the others, believes that fortune favours the brave But he has little of Mr Rumsfeld’s bravado He is soft-spoken and mild-mannered. Mr Bush refers to him as “Wolfie”, but a less lupine individual is hard to imagine.No one has been on the Iraq case longer and more persistently than Mr Wolfowitz.

That tenacity is a large reason why the Iraq debate in Washington has moved so quickly from theoretical possibility to the precise timing of an invasion (though many would contend that even the date has long been virtually set in stone).In 1992, the last year of the first Bush Administration when Mr Wolfowitz held Mr Feith’s present job and Dick Cheney ran the Pentagon, he put together an updated “Defence Planning Guidance”, a strategy blueprint for future US military leaders. It proposed that with the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States doctrine should be to assure that no new superpower arose to threaten America’s benign domination.Washington would defend its unique status by sheer military power, but also by being such a constructive force in world affairs that no one would want to challenge it. America would participate in coalitions, but on an ad hoc basis. The US would be “postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated”. The document called for pre-emptive attacks against states bent on acquiring nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Among the hypothetical wars, Mr Wolfowitz imagined, was one against a Saddam Hussein out to avenge defeat in the 1990-91 Gulf war.A decade ago this was red meat indeed, and the final text was watered down. But the document sets out exactly the thinking that underpins today’s intended Pax Americana.