When Bush bought the property and built his house in the mid-1990s, he told the architect that he wanted a house where he could lounge on his sofa and enjoy a hamburger and beans.

But Bush's second Crawford summer, which comes to an end this weekend, will be remembered not as one where the President relaxed. Instead it will go down in history as the summer when the 'hawks' and 'doves' in his Republican Party fought for his ear over whether to invade Iraq.

At the end of this summer break the questions remain unanswered: Will Bush go to war over Iraq? If so, how and when? The world is no closer to knowing, despite the urgent flow of visitors to Crawford, all on Iraqi business.

Throughout August the generals, the intelligence officials and the most senior figures in the Bush administration, including Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, have shuttled back and forth to Crawford, armed with battle plans, political read-outs, diplomatic cables, legal advice and fresh evidence of Iraqi wrongdoings to present the case for military action.

They have not had it all their own way. Last week it was the turn of the Saudi Ambassador to the US, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, to make the trip to Bush's Texas hidey-hole, enjoying a barbecue lunch of chicken and biscuits and warning against a new Gulf war.

And still - officially at least - Bush remains 'undecided' on whether, how or when to go to war to remove Saddam Hussein. Amid this indecision, the Republican Party is being convulsed by its deepest schism since the 1950s in the battle for the President's favour.

It is a debate the hawks have couched in the bitterest of terms, with senior dissenting Republicans, those on Capitol Hill as well as those who surrounded Bush's father in senior posts, standing accused of being 'appeasers'. They are denounced as 'European' - a term of particular abuse - or fellow travellers of the 'anti-war Left'.

For their part, the doves have responded with similarly angry reproaches, accusing the pro-war lobby that forms the first circle around the President of ignoring Congress and pushing an 'ill-thought-out strategy' that has 'sown widespread confusion' among America's allies. They say this vagueness has allowed Saddam to canvass wider support in the Gulf region in the bid to ensure his survival. What is clear is that this is more than just another party political squabble. Its outcome will dictate whether or not there will be war.

The battle royal in the Grand Old Party has thrown up a new vocabulary of difference in the American Right. It comes as new polls by CNN and Newsweek have shown a 20-point drop in support for a war on Iraq among the American public and even greater opposition to the idea of the US 'going it alone'. On the side of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rice is the party's 'neo-conservative' wing - those who, in the words of Rice, believe that America, as the last superpower, has an 'imperial but not imperialist' destiny. This brings responsibilities, chief of which, it would appear, is the removal of Saddam.

In the other corner, Cavaliers to Cheney's Roundheads, is the 'realist' wing of the Republicans. The realist position on Iraq is simply summed up. The United States, it says, should attempt to contain Saddam diplomatically, while giving equal, if not more, weight to securing Afghanistan and achieving peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

They say the country should not act outside the United Nations, which is pressing for a return of the weapons inspectors who left Iraq three-and-a-half years ago. Crucially, the realists add, any decision to go to war should be endorsed by a Congress that has been given sufficient evidence to be convinced of the pressing need for conflict.

Chief among the realists are George Bush Sr's Secretary of State, James Baker, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Bush Sr's own National Security Adviser, General Brent Scowcroft - not men you would usually describe as 'doves'.

The realists also have powerful support on Capitol Hill, in the form of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who fought in Vietnam and has publicly cautioned against war. Senator John Warner, the senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, has also complained of an 'information gap' between the White House and Congress and called for Rumsfeld to appear before his committee to explain the need for military action.

Straddling the two camps, according to one of his confidants quoted by CNN, is Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is in favour of war, but only if America can persuade its allies - and the United Nations - to back it.

The confusion has become all the more evident as pro-war officials tie themselves in knots, contradicting each other in public on what the policy actually is - and why.

'The truth is that the longer that this business goes on the more damaging it becomes to US foreign policy,' said one realist on Capitol Hill. 'We have got to the stage where the President seems to be saying one thing and Vice-President Dick Cheney is saying something different, and other officials something else.

'The neo-conservatives are putting out a message that appears to be at odds with the administration, and the problem that we find ourselves in is that we no longer know what is going on. Saddam Hussein may be a very bad man, but he is not a stupid one and this confusion helps him.'

If the realists look back to the first Bush presidency, the neo-conservatives hark back to a previous presidency too - that of Ronald Reagan - and a doctrine of unadulterated American might. Their articles of faith include the notion that the interests of Israel and America are indivisible. They also support arms spending and oppose arms control and believe in the unilateralist notion that the United States should assume 'imperial' responsibilities.

On no issue are they more hardline than on the question of war with Iraq. Indeed, as long ago as January 1998 many of the leading neo-conservatives now enjoying positions of power in the Bush administration - including the Under Secretary for Arms Control John Bolton; Pentagon Defence Policy Board chair Richard Perle; Rumsfeld and his deputy Paul Wolfowitz - put their names to a letter to then President Bill Clinton, arguing that he should make the removal of Saddam and his regime from power an aim of American foreign policy.

They receive vocal support from a phalanx of right-wing lobby groups, newspaper columnists and influential figures such as former CIA director James Woolsey, another signatory to the 1998 letter. Woolsey, like other key neoconservatives - Bush included - believes America should press ahead with plans to depose Saddam and set about 'de-Baathising' Iraq in the same way the allies de-Nazified Germany after the Second World War.

Indeed Woolsey and his friends believe we are already in the middle of a new world war, which demands 'regime change' across the region, beginning with Iraq. 'We have to stop regarding the region as a gasoline station for our SUVs and move the nations of the Mid-East to decent government. Outside Turkey and Israel, the region has governments that are pathological predators or vulnerable autocracies and we need to change that,' he says.

'We should give Arabs the same hope that we've given Germans, Japanese, Russians and other countries that moved from autocracies and dictatorships towards democracy in the twentieth century. We need to work on that process for the Arab world too.'

The nature of the conflict between the neo-conservatives and the realists, say observers, is as much about the conflicting political styles and backgrounds of the men around the two Bushes as it is about the key issues of foreign policy.

On the one side are the first-generation 'Bushies' who surrounded George Sr, high-powered and pragmatic Europhile Wasps, with their roots in the politics of the American North-East. His son, on the other hand, is an adopted member of the American South. He is surrounded by Bushies of a completely different ilk.

Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of Defence during Reagan's first term, believes that the battle between the realists and neo-conservatives is drawn on classic divisions within the Republican Party.

'George Bush Sr was from the North-East. They have always been the internationalist Republicans who want to work with other nations to the extent that they could. The current President is from the old Robert Taft wing of the party - from the South and Midwest. People call them isolationists, but that really means they're unilateralists. They just want to do what they want.'

Taft ran for the Republican presidential nomination three times, in 1944, 1948 and 1952. He was famously known as 'Mr Republican' and opposed America's membership of Nato. He lost the 1952 nomination to Dwight Eisenhower. The split has persisted in the party, obscured for the last four decades by the uniting cause of the Cold War.

Korb says: 'Bush [Jr] has gone out of his way to repudiate the international criminal court, the Kyoto protocol, arms control treaties, because the party is dominated by people from the South who are pushing the unilateralist line.'

So will Bush go to war? The conventional wisdom is that, as a member of this unilateralist tradition, he will simply ignore the nay-sayers in his own party and among his allies, particularly in Europe, where war against Iraq has become as divisive a political issue as in the United States, particularly in Britain and Germany.

But, despite his support for regime change in Iraq, insiders say that Bush has adopted a considerably more nuanced role in the past few weeks, allowing Congress to debate the issue and letting the issue of a last throw of the dice for the UN weapons inspectors - rejected by the hawks - be debated in his inner councils.

It is the caution, say observers, of a man who knows that history will judge him alone for the consequences of what he decides. And now Congress will be the key battleground as realists and neo-conservatives both step up their war of words ahead of a planned debate on war with Iraq next month. That debate, for which Bush last week promised the full participation of his key advisers and officials, has been a victory of sorts for the realist camp. They had feared that Bush might go to war without 'deigning' to disclose the evidence against Saddam that made military action necessary.

There has been a second victory for the realists last week. Bolstered by allies such as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, they have pressured Bush to make a last effort to return the UN weapons inspectors to Iraq.

But, observers say, if the Republican realists hope the debate will represent an opportunity for a veto on war, they may be disappointed.

Supporters of the neo-conservatives point out that while Congress gave the first President Bush its approval for his own Gulf war a decade ago - after intense pressure to consult it - the body has declared war formally on only five occasions: the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War and the two world wars. By contrast, US Presidents, acting as commander-in-chief, have dispatched US troops abroad on more than 120 occasions.

The hawks are also not too bothered about the attempt to reintroduce UN weapons inspectors. They believe this effort will fail in the face of US demands for access which, they believe, Saddam will not be able to meet. This would set the stage for an inspection crisis that would make war inevitable.

'What is certain is that in those surrounding President Bush there is still an agreement that Saddam must go,' said one source last week. 'But while a lot of people are assuming decisions have been made already, Bush has yet to come to any decisions.'