Rupert Cornwell: Bush braces for his historic blooding

WASHINGTON - Maybe, just maybe, today's meeting of Tony Blair, George Bush and Jose Maria Aznar in the Azores will provide a formula to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable on the United Nations Security Council.

Maybe, it will come up with an extended deadline for Saddam Hussein that both fits in with Mr Bush's military requirements and overcome's France's refusal to countenance 'a philosophy of ultimatum' and that inspections must be given a further chance to succeed.

But the odds are surely massively against. "It is time to bring it to a conclusion," said Condoleezza Rice, the President's national security adviser, yesterday, hours after the summit had been announced, "It's time for Saddam Hussein to finally comply with resolution 1441, it's time for the Council to resolve this."

So much too for Chile's proposal yesterday of three more weeks of inspections - brusquely dismissed by Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman, as a "nonstarter." Instead, Mr Fleischer described the summit as a chance for the three to discuss "prospects for resolving the situation peacefully with diplomacy in final pursuit of a United Nations resolution."

Far more likely though, it is likely to seal what has been a breathtaking failure of American diplomacy.

From the very moment Resolution 1441 was passed last November, the US has seemed determined it would not work, relentlessly preparing for war even as it professed its attachment to peace. But these last few days have been a special shambles. Mr Bush's swaggering assertion that the US would go for a second United Nations Security Council resolution this week "no matter what the whipcount" has given way to a willingness to let a vote slip to Monday or beyond – if indeed the vote takes place at all.

These 'concessions', however, have been drowned out by the drumming of a master's fingers on his desk, waiting for an unruly class to come to heel.

But the pupils refused. For all the intimidating sticks and juicy carrots at its disposal, Washington has found itself in the humiliating position of having failed to win over the likes of Cameroun, Angola, and Guinea. Why, after all, should they put their necks on the block and commit to the Americans when a resolution might not be tabled at all? For the Azores meeting to succeed, Mr Bush will have to stomach an extension of the disarmament deadline for Saddam which would make a mockery of his every threat this year that the Iraqi leader had just a "few weeks" – now a "few days" - to comply.

The French have been a convenient scapegoat. But the root of the problem has been America's hubris, and its unspoken but self-evident conviction that it knew best, and the assumption that the rest of the world however grudgingly would have to fall into line.

"This has not been our finest diplomatic hour," a US official told the New York Times yesterday, in what even at this early stage of 2003 must be a contender for understatement of the year.

The clumsy dealings at the UN have been matched elsewhere. As before the last Gulf War, Turkey's stance has been a vital element in preparations. In the run-up to Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the then Secretary of State James Baker went to Ankara three times. This time Colin Powell has not been once, to provide the personal, photo-op touch that no amount of massaging by telephone can match.

The US offered lots of money, to be sure. But after the Parliament still said no to the deployment of US troops for a second front to be launched across Turkey's border with Iraq, Washington angrily demanded "clarification," diplomatic-speak for "What the hell's going on?" This week, Mr Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney wrote to and rang Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in a last-ditch attempt to secure permission.

But Thursday's decision by the Pentagon to move a dozen Cruise-missile warships from waters near Turkey to the Red Sea, suggests Washington has finally given up on Ankara changing its mind, at least in time to make any difference to planning for an invasion that still seems likely sometime later next week.

And then there is the "road map." Yesterday, Mr Bush promised he would unveil the route the US envisages to a peace settlement between the Palestinians and Israelis by 2005, just as soon as the Palestinian Authority's new Prime Minister, had been confirmed – perhaps as soon as next week. Better late than never, to be sure. But why so late, when Tony Blair and others have been pleading for a such a move for months? If it was intended as political cover for Mr Blair, in the likely event of failure to secure even the nine vote 'moral majority' (irrespective of a veto) for a second UN resolution, it was the diplomatic equivalent of a single tiny bush on the scorching African plain.

There is also the small matter of how the US will focus on the Middle East conflict, when it is embroiled in the rebuilding of Iraq, and whatever other unforeseen consequences might flow from the war. At the moment, Washington does not even have a special envoy in charge of the Middle East process.

More symbolically, Mr Bush's appearance in the White House Rose Garden to announce his intentions pointed up again his reluctance to submit himself to questioning, and his unwillingness – or inability – to explain himself. The same thing happened at Mr Bush's "press conference" of February 6, when the questioners were pre-selected and fobbed off with pre-cooked answers. Once again, it was left to Mr Blair in London to perform that role, and make the best of a bad job.

The irony is that the man who will be most directly tarred with the debacle is Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, who had generally been seen as the lone standard bearer for diplomatic professionalism and restraint, in an administration generally perceived as lacking in those skills. Now even his own diplomats have circulated a paper suggesting that a new Iraq is unlikely to prove a beacon of democracy for a new Middle East – undercutting one of the prime justifications for war advanced by his President.

The war may yet be won quickly and relatively cleanly, a demonstration of the unparalleled technology and firepower of the military at the disposal of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, the hawks at the Pentagon who, unlike the Secretary of State, never wanted to go the UN route in the first place.

But even in the glow of victory, the diplomatic failure that preceded it is unlikely to be entirely forgotten. Gen. Powell will not be able to escape responsibility. Yet more dangerous in the longer run, the Bush administration will probably conclude that Rumsfeld and Cheney were right.

The Azores, as the White House stresses, truly will not be a "war summit." It is not so much a last chance to prevent war as a last chance to preserve the impression, at least, that America will play by the international rules.

- INDEPENDENT