Tony Blair is almost certain to back any US action against Saddam Hussein. But, writes Frank Millar in London, if he does, he will have to put down a substantial revolt - one that could extend to inside his cabinet
An American Warwolf in London. That was how the Daily Mirror depicted US Vice President Dick Cheney this week as he sought Tony Blair's backing to halt Saddam Hussein's development of weapons of mass destruction and prevent "a marriage" between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda's terrorist network.
Britain's "President" Blair would not have liked that; nor the same paper's headline a few days earlier showing Mr Blair and the real President Bush, complete in stetsons, under the headline: "Howdy, Poodle." For a New Labour administration notoriously short on humour, such mockery is hard to take. But there is no shortage of it now. Mr Blair may still be a wow from Wall Street to Washington, but back in Britain - at least on Labour's own backbenches - the charge is once again explicit that Britain's world statesman is little more than a "bag carrier" for the American Administration.
More than 70 Labour MPs have now signed a Commons motion expressing their "deep unease" about any British support for an American strike against Iraq. That unease deepened last weekend with reports that President Bush was asking for 25,000 British troops to join an American-led task force to overthrow Saddam, and that a secret Pentagon assessment had concluded the US should be ready to use nuclear weapons against no fewer than seven potential adversaries - China, Russia, Iran, Iraq, North Korea, Libya and Syria.
If the Pentagon document was of the contingency worst case scenario type necessarily prepared and regularly up-dated for a superpower, then some newspaper accounts of US plans for "first strike" nuclear attacks may be said to have been overblown.
On the key issue of the moment, however, there appears little doubt that the Bush Administration is resolved to topple Saddam Hussein. The remaining questions are about the means to that end. And the press has no need to hype or overstate the revulsion rising on Mr Blair's backbenches.
"It is frankly horrendous to many of us," declared Father of the House Tam Dayell when he opened a short debate on the issue recently in Westminster Hall (and not, to his chagrin, on the Floor of the House of Commons). And he charged ministers: "If there is to be a war, it must surely be a 'just war' - in the words of Aquinas. We should consider those words: one of the conditions of a 'just war' is that everything possible should be done to avoid war. That means talking to the government and people of Iraq."
Fellow Labour MP Alan Simpson echoed that sentiment. First, he insisted, Mr Blair must understand that any war against Iraq would not be as part of the Alliance-led war on terrorism, for no evidence had been found to link Iraq with the September 11th attacks.
Second, if Mr Blair was intent on travelling to America in early April, there was little point in seeing President Bush in Texas "but a great deal of point of going to see Kofi Annan (because) any action in respect of Iraq must be UN led with a fresh UN mandate."
Third, he told the duty junior Foreign Office minister Ben Bradshaw: "He must take back to his cabinet colleagues the reality that any prime minister of this country who signs a blank cheque of endorsement of American military action will be signing up to George Bush's war - the war of his daddy's ego - and such a cheque will not be sanctioned or supported by other parts of the international community."
And, finally, he concluded: "Wherever Mr Blair makes his announcement about UK involvement... he will end up walking down that path alone."
Downing Street acknowledges that many Labour MPs have genuine doubts which need to be addressed. However it sees other critics as irreconcilable opponents of all things American. And its disposition toward them was spectacularly revealed at the end of this debate when Mr Bradshaw dismissed George Galloway MP for having "made a career of being, not just an apologist, but a mouthpiece, for the Iraqi regime over many years."
It will hardly be long before the charge of "appeasement" once more fills the Westminster air. For there is little doubt in Whitehall that, come the moment, Mr Blair will once again stand "shoulder to shoulder" with President Bush.
Excitable accounts of last week's longer-than-usual cabinet discussion of the issue prompted speculation that such a decision could trigger ministerial resignations. Clare Short and Robin Cook are counted among the doves. Home Secretary David Blunkett, too, was taken to be reflecting growing concerns when he said the government must consider the effect on Britain's social cohesion and the situation in the Middle East before making any commitment to back the US.
Ms Short has not hesitated to signal her concerns about Washington hawks at various points since September 11th, and she did famously quit Neil Kinnock's shadow cabinet in 1991 over the first Gulf War. However the fact of the cabinet debate, and the thoughtful demeanour of ministers like Mr Blunkett and party chairman Charles Clarke, should be seen in the essential context of Mr Blair's need to manage his party and prepare public opinion for decisions yet some way down the line.
If, as seems likely, Mr Blair decides to back America it will be, as Peter Riddell observed in The Times of London, because he shares their assessment that Iraq has repaired the damage to its capacity to acquire and develop weapons of mass destruction, and that Saddam Hussein represents "a clear and present danger".
Once satisfied about the rightness of his cause, he will be compelled by that same highly developed moral code identified by former deputy chief of staff Pat McFadden as he set all doubts aside last September.
And, as he courts potentially his biggest rift with his own party to date, Mr Blair will hardly find great difficulty in choosing between his Atlanticist and European instincts. For, as The Irish Times has previously reported, he resolved that issue too last September.
According to one insider Mr Blair moved on that fateful day "to differentiate himself from Europe" because the experience of Kosovo had left him with the sense that a lot of Europeans "talked the talk but weren't prepared to walk the walk." Once committed, President Bush knows Mr Blair is a man who will walk the walk - albeit, as backbencher Alan Simpson predicts, that it may prove his loneliest yet.