In the Gulf, they hope that when war comes, the Americans are right and that it will all be over fast. Deaglán de Bréadún reports from AbuDhabi
The closer you get, the more it looks like war. Nobody I have met since arriving in the Persian Gulf believes the conflict can or will be averted at this stage. From this vantage point, international diplomacy looks like a game, the UN seems a harmless toy shop, the protesters on CNN well-meaning but naïve.
The hawks planned it this way a long time back and the script was written well in advance. A huge thunderstorm is about to break over Iraq. A hellish rain of missiles and explosives will pour from the heavens. Almost immediately the troops from the US- led coalition will move in to surround Baghdad.
The Iraqi forces will be so shocked they will surrender before they are even asked.
At least that is how most analysts here summarise the American position. The US-led forces are expected to hit Saddam Hussein from every possible direction, drawing on their vast store of weapons.
There is much talk of the MOAB, the ominously Biblical and apocalyptic acronym for a "Massive Ordnance Air-burst Bomb", which weighs 9.5 tonnes and has the impact like a small nuclear weapon, complete with mushroom-cloud.
Great store is being placed on breaking the morale of the Iraqis.
Superior numbers and more sophisticated technology should give the US the advantage, although older readers will recall the same thing was said about Vietnam.
A British business executive working with an arms company here was decidedly less optimistic: "The Americans have messed it up. They had this lovely world coalition against terror but everything had to be done their way. Now they are virtually on their own."
An Arab intellectual countered the view that Iraqi morale was low with a pessimistic analysis of the state of mind of the US and allied forces. This was not an idealistic war, in his view. The Western soldiers knew the rest of the world was at best ambiguous and, more often, hostile towards their coming endeavours.
Speed was of the essence, he said. A quick victory would see Bush and Blair smelling of roses and the French finished as a diplomatic and commercial force in the Middle East. But he believed the forces around Saddam, especially the Republican Guard, would fight hard because their backs were to the wall.
It would not be like the invasion of Kuwait where Iraqi soldiers could surrender in the knowledge that they would be back home sooner or later.
He felt that mass bombing of strategic points in Baghdad would not work because key Iraqi forces would embed themselves in locations which the Americans could not bomb because there were too many civilians, such as public transport, educational or religious focal-points.
Then the Iraqi soldiers would emerge and meet the incoming troops hand-to-hand. The body-bags would start to flow back to the US, taking the shine off a high-tech war.
Napoleon's dictum that, in warfare, "morale is to the physical as three is to one", is about to be tested yet again. Another great imponderable is whether the Iraqis still possess sufficient weapons of mass destruction to cause problems for the US-led forces.
In the early 1990s I visited Halabja and saw for myself what the dictator was willing to do to his own citizens, when he killed some 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in a gas attack.
Nobody is too worried here in Abu Dhabi but, up the road in Kuwait, citizens are fearful of chemical and/or biological attack.
If it comes, many of them will hear about it first on their mobile phones: the text-message of doom.
A Kuwaiti website is polling its readers to ask if they think the war will come this month. The multiple-choice answers are: a) Yes; b) No; c) Maybe; d) Don't care any more.
Yesterday a man showed me a decontamination kit with a small black bottle as the centrepiece. "It works very fast and de-activates chemical weapons," he said. "Very, very quick."
Meanwhile, the weather grows increasingly hot and oppressive and there are reports of storms in the desert.
Presumably their commanders will seek to move troops at night, when it is of course much cooler. I would not like to be a grunt or squaddie lugging weapons and a pack in daytime in this climate.
Everybody is waiting and it does not look as if they will have to wait much longer.
Colin Powell has already advised weapons inspectors and journalists to vacate Baghdad. Old hands detect parallels with the build-up to the first Gulf War. You can almost feel the ground rumbling beneath your feet.
Will the mighty hammer blow bring the desired result or will it somehow miss the nail?
The days of uncertainty will soon be at an end.