Sigmund Siignatuur, Jordan Times

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HAVE YOU noticed how the phrase “the roadmap” has tucked itself nicely into the English language? It is often used in political language. Until the Palestinian-Israeli crisis was downgraded by the media, the Americans often referred to how the road map for peace was being jeopardised. Now the roadmap is clearly in use again vis-ý-vis the coming conflagration with Iraq.

Well, to be fair, there are two roadmaps. One is to bow to most countries, both in the Security Council and in the General Assembly. With few exceptions, and no love for the Iraqi regime (“We do not indulge the leader of Iraq,” said the French foreign minister at the UN), most countries believe that the correct route is to allow inspection to take place at its own speed.

“This cannot last forever”, the French foreign minister said again, but the people most qualified to decide if the inspection is bogged down by obdurate Iraqi officialdom are the 74-year-old diplomat Hans Blix and his team of inspectors. However, doing such thorough inspections takes time. Blix said that it took the previous inspection teams seven years to remove 90 per cent of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and, therefore, to carry out the rest of the task could not be just a matter of a few weeks. Asked if it would take him another year (as has been suggested), he was rather less forthcoming. So, just to repeat, it is the inspectors who decide on compliance or otherwise and the road map leaves the possibility open of a UN sanctioned military operation.

The other (and more contentious view) is the roadmap driven by a man who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue and another man who lives on Downing Street. They have built a relatively small “coalition of the willing”.

This war is less popular than the Gulf War and, at the moment, much harder to sell. However, I digress. The US and the UK, plus several other countries, also have a loathing of the Iraqi regime, but they take a very different attitude towards how to treat this regime than the bulk of other nations.

An Arab lady recently told me that the arrival of 200,000 troops was a bluff to make Saddam Hussein cooperate. There can be no doubting the fact that such a force has made the regime cooperate (Jacques Chirac has expressed his agreement with this view) but the energy put into sending 200,000 troops is somewhat more than a bluff. It is a reality that will soon be more than mere posturing.

I believe that in this case looks deceive. The UN can be embraced or ignored, as the situation arises. If the US ignores the will of the UN, this will not be the first or last time that a country has thumbed their nose at this body. The USSR, when it was involved in “colonialism” and quashing their satellite states and beyond, were often doing just this. You don't have to be a large country to ignore what happens in New York, as Rwanda and Burundi proved. So there are plenty of precedents for defiance and being in material breach of UN feeling. In fact, this may very well take place in the near future.

Timing now becomes everything. Some months ago, it was useful for the US to use the UN and to show that this body should be the roadmap forward. After all, if the UN were used and it reached the right conclusions, the US would have had the moral high ground (even if the reality is that successive US administrations have doubts about the organisation).

The US and its allies want a regime change. This perspective (in the view of some Western policy makers, it has been of paramount importance since the atrocities of Sept. 11) has to happen before the hot weather starts in the region. So, by the end of March, hostilities must take place. I believe that going along with the inspectors and agreeing to the initial stages of the recent UN resolution to allow the inspection some time to prove that Saddam was hiding nasty things was always a charade.

The US administration was only going to allow a certain amount of time to the UN and Blix to “play” at finding weapons. The US administration knew all along that this “game” was only allowable for a certain amount of time. It was really like a father telling a child that they had two hours to complete a complicated jigsaw puzzle when in reality it would take a great deal longer to complete.

In November, the Americans could afford to be magnanimous. We were in the depths of winter and pure diplomacy could be at the forefront. These are bread and butter issues to diplomats used to spending long evenings discussing the minutiae of syntax and semantics. Now we have a new resolution that needs an instant answer because the rays of the Baghdad sun beckon.

I am sure that the man who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue has many prepared speeches in his desk in the Oval Room. I am sure that one of them acknowledges the great debt we owe to the United Nations who have backed military solution in the hour of need. I am also convinced there is another speech that talks about how, in this dreadful moment, the US has been let down by this august body, but it will not shirk from its responsibility of taking on the demonic state of Iraq.

From the beginning, the US has never felt “at home” with the reintroduction of the inspection team, but in the eyes of the world, it had to go down this path. You see, it depends on which side of the coin you are looking at. Blix has reported that they have made significant progress but they need more time. Blix has also said that there are some problems with the Iraqi overtures. Now the conundrum is to which side of the coin we shall look. Shall we be optimistic and say that Blix is inching towards success, as the Russians, Germans, French and Chinese say, and therefore the logical thing is that more time is needed or do we say that Blix and company have found problems and these problems may be seen as major obstructions towards disarmament? The latter position is that taken by the “coalition of the willing” because it is not prepared to offer the inspectors more time and because it has never really believed in this road map and it wants to attack Iraq.

Chances are that they may not even get nine votes on the Security Council, but one thing is certain: they are no longer interested in vetoes, statistics or any other morally inhibiting factors; they are going to launch an attack. So you are either with us, neutral or against us. You have your roadmap and we have ours. It is too late to alter the map. Whether some nations who oppose the “coalition of the willing” will actually veto is another thing.