But then, what's there to react to? It isn't that the decision was expected, or unexpected, for that matter. Rather, after so many months of keeping everyone guessing, Mr. Chretien has achieved what one must imagine was his aim from the start: He has dithered so long that, on the very brink of war, no one cares what Canada does.

It's not as if Canada could have contributed much in military terms, even had Mr. Chretien not packed off what remains of our forces to Afghanistan for the duration. Indeed, one possible explanation for Mr.

Chretien's decision not to commit troops to the Iraq campaign is that we weren't asked: What would otherwise be a humiliating snub thereby becomes a principled stand. But our participation, however meagre, would have lent the Americans moral support, and Mr. Chretien's refusal to do even that is as telling as it was predictable.

For this decision signals more than merely the end of the Prime Minister's little game of hide-and-seek. At a stroke, Mr. Chretien has effectively achieved the left's long-held ambition: Canada's withdrawal from NATO. It is a matter of relative unimportance that he has done so just as NATO is about to collapse.

Once the present campaign is out of the way, that is, the Americans are going to take stock. They are in a battle, they believe, for their very survival, a desperate race to snuff out macroterrorism at its source, in its sponsor states, before it can strike again. They need to know who their real friends are, who they can rely on, who has something to offer.

In such a climate, the United States will have little tolerance for the kind of nonsense it once might have been prepared to endure, whether the decadence and log-rolling that has always been the special forte of the United Nations, or the near paralysis into which NATO has lately sunk. In the post-Cold War world, and more particularly in a post-Sept.

11 world, does the United States really need to tie itself into a fixed alliance with the likes of Belgium, France, Germany -- or Canada?

Indeed, did it ever? It's not as if any of these countries have really pulled their weight in the alliance. Even this might be tolerable, were it not for an unfortunate side-effect: Nestled under the American defensive umbrella for 50-odd years, European and Canadian public opinion eventually forgot that it existed. Without need to provide for their own defence, they came round to the view that no one did, that defence itself was unnecessary.

The Canadian version of this was especially acute. For most of the last four decades, Canada has lived in the pretense that, while the Americans were allied with us, we need not be allied with them. We could be a kind of Sweden, declining to associate ourself with American foreign policy -- such militarism! such anti-communism! -- even as the Americans paid for our defence: neutrality on the Americans' dime. We could enjoy a moral free ride, as well as an economic one.

But the Americans are no longer in the mood for such delusions. The last few weeks have seen to that. Already there is talk of removing troops from Germany, and that's just the start. It may be that, post-Iraq, the Americans will discard all such fixed alliances, in favour of more ad hoc "coalitions of the willing." Or if they do wish to cast these alliances in some more permanent form, it will be with states that are actually prepared to contribute something in return -- or at the very least, will not desert them in a crisis. Hmmm. Now who does that leave out?

So Mr. Chretien's decision has the virtue of clarifying matters. In future, not only will Canada be defenceless, or nearly so, but also friendless, at least as far as military matters are concerned. Our defence policy will be that of the possum: to roll ourselves into a little ball, making ourselves as inoffensive as we can to any possible attacker, in the hopes that we might avoid being a target. Let others do the hard work of tackling the rogue states of the world, expansionist dictatorships and their terrorist allies. We'll just be over here in the corner.

On a certain level, there's something to recommend this approach. We save a lot of money, we make friends in the Third World, and we spare our citizens from harm -- we hope. Perhaps the Americans, once they are rid of us as "allies," will not take further reprisals. But that is not really the question. The question we should ask ourselves is: Is this the kind of country we want to be?

It is instructive to compare the debates in Britain and Canada. In the British press, the suggestion that Britain might opt out of the war at the last minute brought forth anguished discussions of whether Britain could ever again be trusted to be a dependable ally -- to be, as The Daily Telegraph put it, "a brave and honourable influence in the world." Can anyone imagine talking about Mr. Chretien's foreign policy in such terms? It isn't just that stabbing your best friend in the back is cowardly and dishonourable. It is that the very notions are alien to him. That isn't, he might protest, what foreign policy is about. It isn't what Canada is about. Courage, honour, patriotism, duty, loyalty, sacrifice: These are too high-falutin', we snigger, the stuff of American propaganda films.

If there is a principle underlying the Canadian position, it is a blind, unthinking devotion to multilateralism. But this is not a principle: It's a process. Mr. Chretien does not pretend that the war is illegal. Indeed, he has said on many occasions that Resolution 1441 provided ample legal justification for the use of force. His objection consists entirely in the Americans' inability to obtain assent for yet another resolution, largely because the French reneged on promises they made in negotiations on 1441. Because there is a lack of consensus on the Security Council, that is enough to condemn the enterprise in Mr.

Chretien's view, no matter what the cause, no matter what the motives of the various parties.

This is the patriotism of fools: multilateralism, uber alles. The United Nations, right or wrong. We will be paying the price for generations.