A lesson in diplomacy on the Iraq crisis from a past master in the craft

If anyone needed to know what world statesmanship ought to be about, and how far short Washington is now falling behind it, they need only have listened to the speech given by Bill Clinton to the Labour Party Conference yesterday. While urging the need to pin Iraq to complete removal of weapons of mass destruction and lauding Tony Blair (a little too far in his partisan attack on the Tories), he set out powerfully what diplomacy should be about at the moment – the return of the UN inspectors not a change by armed force of the regime in Baghdad.

Unfortunately his successor in Washington is not of the same mould, or persuasion. While Saddam Hussein, in accepting the unconditional return of UN arms inspectors, has finally said "yes" to the UN's long-standing demands, President Bush – with Tony Blair's backing – is trying to up the ante with demands for even more draconian Security Council resolutions.

We now confront an absurd situation. Baghdad and the UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, say the inspectors can return within as little as two weeks. Mr Blix, who answers – let it not be forgotten – to the UN, says that Iraq will grant all that the UN Security Council has ever asked. Yet Washington and, slightly more delicately, London insist that much more is required.

Their diplomats have been circling the globe, trying to drum up support for a new Security Council resolution that would authorise the use of military force should Iraq not accept a new set of conditions, including a timetable measured in days. So far – in Paris, Moscow and Beijing – their efforts have been in vain, but they are persisting.

Washington and London have been seriously wrong-footed. Baghdad, not for the first time, has proved more agile in the diplomatic arena than its hyperpower antagonist. Even as the agreement in Vienna was being finalised, Washington wheeled out Colin Powell to call for a delay in the talks. When agreement was reached anyway, the White House spoke of "thwarting" it. What sort of diplomacy is this?

No wonder Mr Blix is now bound for New York in the hope of learning what the UN really wants. For the Security Council is patently split. Washington is adamant that a new resolution is needed to govern the inspection regime. Its view, backed by Britain, is that Iraq's track record means that it cannot be trusted. It wants a cast-iron guarantee that the UN will sanction the use of armed force if Iraq wriggles out of its obligations once again.

This distrust is understandable. But Washington's emphasis on what it calls "regime change" as an objective that trumps the return of inspectors, is endorsed by no other UN member, not even by Britain. And it fuels the suspicion, justified or not, that top of the Bush administration's wish-list is not a disarmed Iraq, but war.

War can, and should, be the very last resort. To say to Baghdad that its policy change will not even be tested is irresponsible and wrong. A double Security Council resolution – such as that proposed by France – approving the dispatch of inspectors, while keeping the threat of force open, is a possible alternative.

One month before US Congressional elections, the most harmless interpretation of Washington's brinkmanship is that it is electioneering by a nervous Republican administration. Let us hope that the caution given by Jack Straw, to judge the Bush administration by what it does rather than what it says, turns out to herald the more restrained policies that President Clinton urged in Blackpool.