ANALYSIS: The UN Security Council will meet in an atmosphere of unprecedented strain in Euro-US relations. Conor O'Clery examines what lies behind the row
The UN Security Council chamber will resemble something of a bear pit tomorrow as the 15 members gather to hear the report from the chief weapons inspectors on their meeting with Iraqi officials last weekend.
Relations between the United States and its European allies, France and Germany, have descended to the level of personal rancour, in the worst crisis within the western alliance since the end of the Cold war. The US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, has raised hackles in Paris and Berlin with his jibes about "old Europe". He has also pointedly linked Germany with Libya and Cuba in the line-up over Iraq.
The US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, joined in the mud-slinging with his charge that France, Germany and Belgium had not met their responsibilities in NATO and his dismissal of the French plan for more inspectors as having them "playing detectives or Inspector Clouseau running all round Iraq" - a reference to the bumbling French detective in the Pink Panther films.
The rift is so serious that analysts in Washington see the possibility of the military-political edifice of the Cold War crashing down. The row erupted over the refusal of France, Germany and Belgium to support a US-backed request to give key NATO member Turkey increased defence capacity in preparation for a possible war on Iraq.
There have been rows in NATO before. In the 1956 Suez crisis, the US intervened to stop a joint British, French and Israeli invasion of Egypt. In 1966, the French President Charles de Gaulle expelled US forces and asserted the right to develop its own nuclear deterrent. When the US bombed Libya in 1986, France and Spain refused US aircraft the use of their airspace.
In 1994, some British newspaper headlines even called the row between Washington and London over the Gerry Adams visa the "worst crisis since Suez".
There is a perception in the US this time however that the row reflects a profound change in the old alliance, partly because France and Germany are having trouble coming to terms with the shift in Europe towards the east, where the newly independent nations are much more pro-American.
Over the last few weeks, the Americans have been acting as if "old Europe", with its power centres in Paris and Berlin, was no longer relevant to Washington's plans. Bush administration officials have seized upon the declarations of European support from the Wall Street Journal eight, the governments (Britain, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic) which signed on to an opinion piece for the paper supporting the US, and the 10 other new or aspiring members of NATO (Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) which give credit to the US for their freedom.
"The new members of NATO are mostly pro-American, they are afraid Russia might attack them again," said Mr Daniel Nexon, a foreign relations specialist at Georgetown University in Washington.
The French and the US saw each other now as a "great power wannabe and the religious cowboy big-guy-on-the-block", he said.
In the unipolar world where the US had incredible power, its vision of NATO now was as "an occasional instrument of US policies".
Ms Nancy Soderberg, vice-president of the International Crisis Group, saw the row in NATO "as less to do with Iraq than with the evolving relationship between the Bush administration and Europe".
The US "has been increasingly moving towards making its own decisions on use-of-force questions, starting with Kosovo in 1999". The approach could not be further away from the Bush campaign's pledge of humility in world affairs. "A lot of it is that the French are looking for, to quote the Aretha Franklin line, R-E-S-P-E-C-T - they want to be consulted as a player."
Some old European countries had for their part discovered a new purpose to NATO, to resist American aggression, said Ms Soderberg, who is a former US ambassador to the UN.
The relationship between America and Europe was too important to break down over what was a row concerning a process which reflected "sibling anger and frustration" in the same family.
Some analysts believe that the NATO divisions are symptomatic of a desire for payback after the US spurned international institutions and treaties like Kyoto, the International Criminal Court and the ABM Treaty.
Former Defence Secretary Mr William Cohen told CNBC television that America today had an image problem. "We have a serious challenge to persuade the world population that the threat to our way of life is real and imminent. We haven't done that very well."
The support of Russia and China for the Paris-Berlin line gives "old Europe" more leverage in the Security Council where they hold three of the five vetoes. The French have circulated a plan to Security Council members for tripling the number of weapons inspectors in Iraq and adding more ariel surveillance. It calls for the recruitment of intelligence officers, accountants and archivists to help inspectors and UN customs officers to prevent the import of weapons-related goods.
The initiative is in the form of a "non-paper", that is, it is not proposed as a resolution, but it will serve as a counterpoint to the US drive for a new resolution which will find Iraq in material breach of resolution 1441 - an automatic trigger for war. Much depends on the chief inspectors' report.
The French want to see the glass of Iraqi co-operation half-full, the Americans say already it is just about empty. Dr Blix's report tomorrow will apparently not contain a declaration that Iraq is in clear violation of its obligations, which the United States wants.
Mr Powell made clear to a congressional committee yesterday that he would confront "old Europe" head on tomorrow, whatever the report contains.
Every member who voted for resolution 1441 understood that if Saddam Hussein failed the test he would face serious consequences, he said. He had failed the test, yet France and Germany wanted more inspections, more time.
"The question I put to them is, why more inspections and why more time, or are you just delaying for the sake of delaying in order to get Saddam Hussein off the hook over disarmament?"
Such comments, impugning the motives of Paris and Berlin, set the tone for an ugly debate. Mr Powell still hoped to rally the international community "to discharge its obligations", he said.
"All the nations that we are now having debates with are at the end of the day allies and friends of ours," he added, recalling the row with France over Suez. "We have had our disagreements and fights in the past and we have always managed to find a way forward."