NO MORE RESOLUTION NEEDED:

The only resolution Blair needs is his own (Ferdinand Mount, March 16, 2003, The Sunday Times)

[T]here is something unappealing and even morally dubious about this concentrated haggling at the United Nations, as though upholding the amour- propre of the UN was more important than Saddam's secret weapons or the welfare of his people. And here again I have a sneaking suspicion that Blair has been too punctilious for his own good.

Although he has consistently maintained that a second UN resolution was desirable but not essential, the frantic pace of British diplomacy has told a different story. Never has Talleyrand's advice to young diplomats - "above all, gentlemen, no zeal" - been so disregarded.

We are constantly told that Blair is working "flat out" for a second resolution. In New York Sir Jeremy Greenstock pops up every five minutes with a fresh set of conditions. At one moment we are told that Saddam absolutely has to go on television and say: "I have been a very nasty person and told a lot of lies about the horrible weapons I have been hiding." At the next, we are told: "Oh well, he needn't really, that was just a negotiating ploy."

Saddam himself shows little sign of wanting to join Blair and the other victims of reality TV in any such humiliating rituals. In total contrast, there was a touching ceremony earlier this week in front of the television cameras in the Gaza YMCA, at which Saddam's envoys handed out cheques of up to E18,000 to the families of suicide bombers and other Palestinian terrorists - making suicide bombing just about the best-paid occupation in that miserable region, though not a career with much future, at least not this side of paradise.

The lucky recipients were also handed a certificate inscribed: "Reward of the President- Mujahed Saddam Hussein whom God preserve to honour those who irrigated the holy land with their blood." If you still want evidence of Saddam's links with terror, these much prized certificates seem to me just as good as any smoking gun.

Thus the realities of life in Iraq and the Palestinian territories remain as dismal as ever. Yet polite opinion among the ABC1s in Britain has become obsessed with arcane questions of legality. Does resolution 1441 provide sufficient cover for military action? Some international lawyers say yes, others say no. You can find both answers given from within a single set of chambers, Cherie Blair's as it happens.

Then is it legitimate to disregard an unreasonable veto if there is otherwise a majority for the resolution? No, say the lawyers, a veto is a veto. But what else did we do in Kosovo in defiance of the Russian veto? Was that illegal, or did success somehow make it legal? I am not arguing that the UN should be bypassed or ignored. But it is absurd to pretend that we have always regarded it as the sole arbiter of justice. Anyway, there is surely something repellent about the idea of "cover" for our actions, as though we were contemplating a dodgy business deal rather than setting out to disarm and depose a mass murderer.

And is this obsessive quest for a second UN resolution even the right way to hold the Labour party together? Surely it suggests a lack of confidence in the existing justification for military action and allows the Labour rebels to puff up their moral pretensions? For the first time since Blair came to power, the awkward squad are muttering about a change of leadership. And even those who do not go quite so far are beginning to fear that Blair has already suffered irrecoverable damage. They detect "the glimmer of twilight, never glad, confident morning again", as that acerbic old Tory Nigel Birch said of Macmillan in the Profumo debate, quoting from Browning's poem The Lost Leader.

Well, I am not so sure. Yes, even if the war goes well, the Labour party will continue to haemorrhage members, perhaps even more than it did after the Gulf war. But it may be that ultimately new Labour does not really need the old constituency Labour stalwarts.

It is noticeable that skilled workers - who are crucial to any new coalition of the centre-left - seem much more comfortable with the idea of bringing Saddam down by force than the intelligentsia and the professions. Outside Labour circles, who will really care if Clare Short and Robin Cook do resign? In retrospect, resigning ministers dwindle to dots in the landscape. What we remember is whether the leadership had the will to stick to its commitments - not so much a second resolution as resolution.

And that is a commodity Blair shows no signs of running low on.

Why do papers like the Times make it so hard to access their stuff? Do they really think we're going to subscribe? Posted by Orrin Judd at March 16, 2003 7:05 AM