It's still not clear just what the federal government would do in the event that the Security Council said no -- if France, say, decided to veto the idea, as it has threatened. There were conflicting messages coming out of Ottawa yesterday, as usual. But it is a certainty that, with or without the council's blessing, the United States and its allies intend to disable Saddam Hussein's capacity to inflict mass death on his neighbours, or to help others do the same to the West.

It is unconscionable enough that Canada cannot, at this point, be counted among the allies. We have already paid a price in diplomatic terms, being regarded now as marginal nuisances, where once we were trusted confidantes. But if, in the crunch, we elect to side with France and Germany -- and, by extension, Iraq -- against the United States, on a matter the Americans regard as vital to their security interests, we will be counting the costs for generations. We will be viewed in Washington, not just as irrelevant, but as hostile.

Leave aside the emotional reaction that is likely to engender in the short term. As a matter of cold, dispassionate realpolitik, the Americans will see to it that a price is paid: on trade, on defence, on any matter in which we might once have been given the benefit of the doubt. The political consequences at home, once it is realized what the Chretienites have wrought, will be dire.

And yet it is still possible that Mr. Chretien will do the right thing. The Prime Minister has been careful to keep his options open, never explicitly ruling out the possibility of going to war without UN approval, even as he stressed how averse he was to such a course. The lesson that Mr. Chretien has absorbed from prime ministers past is that it is best to put off painful decisions as long as possible, on the principle that where there's time there's hope; that the longer these are delayed, the greater the odds the issue will somehow resolve itself, and spare him the aggravation. Often, it must be said, this has proved to be the right strategy.

But time is running short, and Mr. Chretien is in danger of boxing himself in. Much will happen in the next few days: the report of the UN arms inspectors, the President's State of the Union Address, the debate and vote in the Security Council. If the council fails to support the U.S.

position -- if that is, it refuses to enforce its own Resolution 1441, passed just 11 weeks ago, threatening "serious consequences" if Iraq refused to comply with more than a dozen past resolutions demanding that it destroy its arsenal of chemical and biological weapons and abandon its nuclear weapons program -- and if Mr. Chretien nevertheless decides to hop on board with the Americans, there will be hell to pay with many members of his own party, especially the anti- American left, who have allowed themselves to be persuaded they will not have to endure such humiliation.

He could probably survive a vote on the matter, with the support of the Alliance. And I think, in the end, public opinion would swing round, even if voters now tell pollsters they oppose going to war without the council's blessing. There is a difference between a preference, expressed in the abstract, and a choice, forced by events. But the damage to his government, and the divisions this would open up within his party, would be profound.

So, for the moment, the government prefers to keep up a furious barrage of ambiguity, one minute stressing how much it prefers the European position -- that war on Iraq cannot proceed unless France, Russia and China decide it serves their interest -- the next seeming to support the Americans. "I agree with the French and German analysis," Bill Graham, the Foreign Minister, told the CBC yesterday, "that at this particular time, we couldn't justify a war." Hours later, Mr. Chretien said Canada would support such a war if there were "great evidence" that Iraq was not complying with the UN's demands, refusing to say whether a second vote of the Security Council would be needed.

But he can't keep this up forever. He can hope and pray the Security Council bails him out. But if it doesn't, he will be forced to choose: action, or inaction; the Americans, or the French; his country, or his party.

Put that way, he really doesn't have a choice. It would be one thing if there were some high principle at stake, sufficient to justify breaking with the United States at such a critical time. But there isn't. To look the other way at Iraq's transgressions; to deny it is in "material breach" of its obligations both to disarm and to show proof that it had; to pretend this failure of nerve would not destroy the UN's credibility; to persist in the delusion that Saddam Hussein does not aim to possess nuclear weapons, or could be contained if he had -- this is not merely diplomatically ruinous. It is morally and intellectually bankrupt.