There has been a lot of sitting around waiting for diplomacy to take its course. On Tuesday morning, many soldiers rose at 3:45 a.m. and made their way to the TV lounges in their warehouse barracks to listen to President Bush’s address. Most were relieved to hear the president give Saddam Hussein a firm deadline. The uncertainty will be over shortly–and so too the chance to sit.

The soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines setting up the new press center here at Central Command already feel like they’ve run a marathon. On my last visit to base, phone lines were being installed for the hordes of reporters who will descend on General Tommy Franks’s first briefing probably later this week. Reporters were moving into their offices along “Ernie Pyle Corridor,” named for the great war correspondent. Just around the corner is “Coalition Way,” where the Aussies and Brits have offices down a rather short hallway. All that was left to do was to hang the sign outside the door and open for business.

The PAOs–public affairs officers–have been training for weeks. While troops do PT, physical training, the staff at CENTCOM’s “forward newsdesk” has been doing its own kind of war drills. A couple times a day they fire up the “rapid response team” to make sure they are in top shape to refute the torrent of disinformation they expect from Iraq once the war starts. “We practice this day in and day out,” says Capt. Frank Thorp, who is running a squadron out of the press center on base. He proposes a question or a scenario and clocks how quickly his team can get the “ground truth” and get it out. “We measure our success in minutes rather than in half hours,” he says.

So far, many of their drills have been with live rounds. Thorp’s team monitors the news–including the Iraqi News Service–around the clock. Each soldier is armed with a classified and a declassified laptop computer as well as two phones. Six TVs drone all the time. When FOX News reported a few weeks ago that a man had tried to enter a Kuwaiti hotel with a Molotov cocktail, the team went into action. Fifteen minutes later, after a few phone calls to U.S. military sources in Kuwait, the forward newsdesk corrected the story. It turned out that the man was caring an old, harmless mortar shell and he had never left the parking lot. “We were able to put out the facts before the story got too wide-spread,” Thorp says.

There hasn’t been a lot of news out of Doha yet. Reporters have resorted to writing about Americans playing in a golf tournament here despite the threat of war. Some have been hitting the links themselves. Those who have gone in search of anti-American or anti-British sentiment among Qataris have found little. The only incident to speak of happened a few weeks ago: an old man began hitting a British woman with his cane at a shopping mall. He apparently thought she was wearing too short of a skirt. There hasn’t been much overt trepidation in Qatar either, even though Saddam Hussein fired a Scud here in 1991. There are no long lines at the supermarket, the gas station or the departure gates at the airport. There are no siren drills like in Bahrain, where they tested their warning system this week. Instead, people here celebrated the end of a two-week international cultural festival with fireworks. When I heard the first explosion, I thought the worst.

There are signs that things could get dicey, even for those of us so far from the front lines. The U.S. Embassy slipped notices under our hotel room doors Tuesday to tell us the threat alert had been raised to orange. “Al-Qaeda probably would attempt to launch terrorist attacks against U.S. interests claiming they were defending Muslims or the ‘Iraqi people,’” the notice said. They weren’t telling Americans to leave, just not to call attention to themselves. Unlike in Kuwait, where embassy staff have been ordered out of the country, Americans working at the embassy here are mostly staying put. Across the Gulf in Dubai, the U.S. embassy has warned Americans to stay away from nightclubs and the like. Any fun people had here waiting for the war is about to come to an abrupt end.