Hopes for a swift resolution permitting force were dashed

The United States and Britain are trying to frame a new Security Council resolution to regain the diplomatic initiative over Iraq.

They have had to go back to the drawing board after strong French-led opposition in the United Nations Security Council blocked their hopes of introducing a swift resolution authorising force against Iraq.

When such a resolution might be introduced is not clear. British officials do not rule out waiting until sometime in March. They say that no decision has been taken. The next date on the diplomatic diary is another report from the weapons inspectors to the Security Council on 28 February.

A truce was agreed within the European Union when a statement straddling the various positions was issued on Monday night.

But the EU is not where the decisions will be taken. So it is now back to the Security Council.

Compliance demanded

The nature of a new resolution has not been made known.

The Security Council cannot continue on this path for much longer - it is time for this to end Condoleezza Rice, US national security adviser

One idea has been to draw up a list of outstanding disarmament issues and then give Iraq a deadline by which it has to comply.

However, Washington wants something firmer, it appears, in the nature of a straightforward condemnation.

The wording is subject to detailed discussions first between the US and UK and then between other members of the Council.

Force

At the same time the American and British determination to use force in the final analysis has not been dented either by what happened in the Council last Friday - when Hans Blix gave Iraq a more positive report than he had done previously - or by the world-wide demonstrations against war.

Both Washington and London are turning to the so-called "moral arguments" for war against Iraq.

 

Blair is facing immense public pressure

That line justifies action less on the technical basis of resolution 1441 and more on the good that it might do the Iraqi people. It is an argument firmly contested, of course, by those opposed to war.

There are still a few weeks to go - perhaps four to six or even more - before troops are fully in position and it is in this window that the decisions will be taken.

After March, the weather heats up in the region and fighting becomes more uncomfortable, though not impossible.

Ruffled feathers

American and British diplomacy has been thrown off course.

Washington and London had been hoping to get a quick second resolution specifically authorising force hard on the heels of the inspectors' last reports on 14 February. The inconclusive nature of those reports dashed those hopes.

 

There will be turbulent times ahead in the Council

The normally suave and assured British UN ambassador Sir Jeremy Greenstock was left defending the Friday set-back as "a good debate".

Diplomats do not like "good debates" - they like victories.

President George W Bush's National Security adviser Condoleezza Rice, who is very much the president's voice, showed some of the frustration in the administration over the latest Blix report when she said that it "gives to the Iraqis the benefit of the doubt which they don't deserve".

Ms Rice added that "The Security Council cannot continue on this path for much longer".

"It is time for this to end," she said. "Enough is enough."

However she added that the US would work for a new resolution, partly it seems because that is what Mr Bush's ally UK Prime Minister Tony Blair needs.

Mr Blair set two conditions for going to war outside the UN Security Council. First, there would have to be a negative report on Iraq from the inspectors.

And second, action would have to be blocked "unreasonably" by the Council itself. The definition of "unreasonably" appears to be in the eye of the British prime minister.