No one expected Hans Blix to restore, at a stroke or in one speech, unity over Iraq among Security Council members. Equally, however, few expected him actually to widen the divide between them by what he said on Friday. Yet the overall balance of what the chief United Nations inspector had to tell the Council about the state of Iraqi disarmament will reinforce the belief by France, Russia and Germany in continuing inspections as the right alternative to war. At the same time, it will stoke the impatience of the US and Britain that Baghdad's lack of full co-operation with the UN is rapidly making inspections pointless and advancing the necessity of war.
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There is no cause at all to question Mr Blix's impartiality, though as an inspector he may be predisposed to believe in the utility of what his team is doing, and still could do, in Iraq. But his switch in tenor will, to put it at its mildest, disconcert the US which was already least inclined to pursue Iraq through the UN.
Washington took heart in Mr Blix last month when he complained about Iraq's lack of "genuine acceptance" of co-operation with UN inspectors on disarmament. But on Friday Mr Blix cast doubt on some of the evidence against Iraq produced by Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, and effectively welcomed the French plan for increased surveillance of Iraq that the US has roundly dismissed. Mr Powell was scathing. Inspections, he reiterated, were not the point of resolution 1441 passed unanimously three months ago. If Saddam Hussein wanted to co-operate, he said, Iraqis would be flooding the UN with documents and queueing to be interviewed. "Force should always be a last resort - but it has to be a resort," said Mr Powell. He ended by urging the Council to start considering applying it to Iraq.
Britain, too, will rue this change in Mr Blix's tenor. Tony Blair has been praying that the chief UN inspector would somehow create a consensus that would allow him to continue backing the US without going against the majority of British public opinion. On Saturday, as several hundred thousand Britons march in protest against war, his dilemma looks worse than ever.
By contrast, France, the leading proponent of disarmament-by-inspection, feels Mr Blix has done its cause a considerable service. Though Mr Blix claimed his team could still verify Iraqi disarmament, if Baghdad improved its co-operation in a "short period", France's foreign minister suggested the next ministerial review of the inspection process should be in a month.
Such a leisurely timetable would be a serious mistake. The Iraqi crisis needs to be brought to a head fairly soon. This should be obvious to European doves as well as American hawks. The reason is that, even if like France, Germany and Russia, one believes more intrusive inspections can achieve disarmament and are far preferable to war, it is important to exploit the US military pressure to make Iraq completely disarm, before that pressure explodes into a unilateral US war against Baghdad. It is true that military pressure has not quite worked so far. But the paradox is that only the US has the leverage required to make the French solution of increased inspections work.
The 1991 ultimatum to Mr Hussein was simple and easy for the Security Council to agree on: get out of Kuwait by a certain date. It is far more complex this time. Resolution 1441 is phrased like an ultimatum, giving Iraq "a final opportunity" to "co-operate fully" in remedying its "material breaches" of its UN disarmament obligations. But Mr Hussein denies he is in breach of these obligations, where he never denied in 1991 that he was in occupation of Kuwait. In addition, what constitutes "co-operation" is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, and therefore differs among various Security Council members.
Yet the bottom line is co-operation, or lack of it. And the man best placed to judge it is Mr Blix. So far he has just produced progress reports, as he did on Friday. What we now need is some kind of final assessment about Iraq's co-operation - and this in, say, two or three weeks in order to maximise the chances of a resolution without a unilateral US war.
On the basis of a final Blix report, the Council could then take its fateful decision on how to enforce resolution 1441. This could take the form of the second resolution being touted by the US and UK, with the Council just restating that Iraq is in breach of UN resolutions, including 1441. In their view, this would give anyone (the US and UK on their own) or everyone (the Council) the green light for military action. But we are not there yet. The lights should be held at amber until Mr Blix reports one more time.
