After weeks of wrangling, they all agreed in the end. Conor O'Clery was at the Security Council for yesterday's momentous vote on Iraq
At 10.15 yesterday morning, Chinese ambassador Zhang Yishan, taking his turn as president of the UN Security Council, gently tapped the horseshoe table with a mallet. The other 14 nation representatives sat down, with diplomats crowded into seats behind them.
Against a backdrop of a giant mural depicting people rising from the depths of slavery, they raised their hands to vote on Resolution 1441. Everyone craned to look at the Syrian ambassador, Mikhail Wehbe. His hand was up.
"Resolution 1441 of 2002 is adopted unanimously," said Mr Yishan. In the end there were no hold-outs, not even from the one Arab country.
The final breakthrough in achieving unanimity for a resolution to give Iraq one last chance to disarm came on Thursday evening when UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, President Vladimir Putin of Russia, and French President Jacques Chirac separately telephoned Syrian President Bashar Assad in Damascus.
They impressed upon him that the American resolution would not be used as a pretext for attacking Iraq and that Iraq's sovereignty would be respected.
The vote from Mauritius also did not come easily. Its popular ambassador, Jagdish Koonjul, was recalled suddenly this week for his failure to embrace the American text, and a junior diplomat voted in his place. "The Americans reached down their chimney and twisted their toes," was how one diplomat described the way the Indian Ocean nation was persuaded to fall into line.
It was actually all over once France and Russia did the deal with America on Thursday. The French were determined not to allow a repetition of December 1998, when the Security Council only heard that the US and UK were bombing Iraq when a security guard told them it was on CNN. The legal argument the US used then was it could go to war on the basis of its own judgment as Iraq was in "material breach" of previous resolutions.
The term is still in the new resolution, but French ambassador Jean-David Levitte told the council that by agreeing to their request for a two-stage resolution, the Security Council would this time "keep control of the process".
Almost all ambassadors explained their Yes vote on the grounds that there was no longer any "automaticity" in the text, no trigger to allow the US to go to war without returning to the Security Council.
Ireland's Ambassador Richard Ryan emphasised that the resolution ensured a "sequential process" and that "as far as Ireland is concerned, it is for the council to decide on any ensuing action".
As far as Russia too was concerned it was up to the Security Council to decide on further action, though the resolution calls on the Security Council only to meet "to consider the situation and the need for full compliance with all the relevant council resolutions in order to secure international peace and security" in the event of Iraqi obstruction.
The word "secure" had originally been "restore" but the Russians argued up to the end that this would imply there already was a breach, and could legitimise war. So the Americans gave in on that.
US ambassador John Negroponte promised there was "no hidden trigger", and "no automaticity" with regard to the use of force. But he told the council that if there was a material breach, and if the Security Council failed to act decisively, the resolution "does not constrain any member" from taking action.
In the end the members evidently decided to worry about that when the time came. But as Zhang Yishan put it, the clouds of difference got thinner and thinner in the last few days and in the end sunlight came.