This is a far more worrisome prospect. A cynical and unprincipled Jean Chretien, after all, is a known element. But Chretien the statesman?

God help us. Either he has been indulging his own worst instincts at a time when this country can least afford it, or he and his ministers have been given very bad advice by a foreign policy establishment that has failed to adjust its thinking to a changed world.

In how many ways has Mr. Chretien got it wrong? Let me name seven.

One, he has clearly misjudged the scale of the threat posed, not just by Saddam, but by the nexus of macroterrorists and rogue states generally.

The obtuse insistence that there was "no proof" Saddam had weapons of mass death was an early warning sign, as was the wilful blindness to the multiple links with al-Qaeda and similar groups. (George Bush's critics like to patronize him for his supposed "black and white" thinking, yet it is the same critics who insist that the likelihood of Saddam arming terrorists with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons be established with mathematical certainty.)

But his misplaced faith in inspections, coupled with his bewildering statement that the President had "won" merely by virtue of inspections having taken place, confirms that he simply does not have a proper grasp of the situation. There has never been a single case in history of a regime that has been disarmed against its will without the use of force.

The notion that Iraq would be the first is laughable.

Two, he has equally failed to recognize the nature of the threat. Mr.

Chretien and his ministers habitually speak in the language of deterrence, construing international law on the basis of outmoded definitions of "imminent threat" -- as if the issue were still nation states with regular armies, rational actors with realistic agendas, rather than terrorists inspired by fantasy ideologies and equipped with weapons whose destructive capacity is matched only by their portability.

Three, he has displayed a quite irrational attachment to multilateralism -- again defined in the narrowest sense as strictly the United Nations -- even where multilateralism has demonstrably failed. At its worst, this has been to the exclusion of any independent assessment of the merits of the case: Canada's position is whatever the Security Council says it is. Unless the Security Council itself fails to take a position, in which case it defaults to France.

Four, he remains firmly in the grip of Westphalian notions of national sovereignty, insisting not only that disarmament can be achieved without regime change, but that it should be: that Saddam must be left in power, whatever happens, even in the event of war. One imagines he is not indifferent to the suffering of Iraqis under Saddam's rule. How, then, does he justify his position? With a shrug and a riddle: "Where do you stop?" I rather thought we had settled this in the Kosovo campaign. But if Mr.

Chretien is so concerned about where to draw the line, then perhaps we should draft some criteria. Before a regime can be deposed, it must meet all of the following conditions: It must have a proven record of territorial aggression; it must have not only acquired but used illegal weaponry; it must have sponsored terrorist groups; it must have engaged in genocide; and it must rank among the most repressive dictatorships on earth. Now what is his objection to deposing Saddam?

Five, he has failed to understand how the technology of modern warfare has altered the calculus of conflict. Civilian deaths? In the last 12 years, the U.S., with its allies, has liberated three countries: Kuwait, Afghanistan and, indirectly, Serbia. The number of civilian deaths in all three campaigns combined comes to about 5,000. For perspective, that is about the number of people Saddam has killed every month since he came to power.

Six, most seriously, he has signally misplaced where Canada's national interests lie in this conflict. I can understand why the French should have seized upon this crisis as an opportunity to hoist itself up as some sort of counterweight to the American "hyperpower": Exalted notions of France's place in the world are as constant a theme of Gaullist politics as truckling with Third World dictators. But what on earth is Canada doing playing along? This country has too much at stake to indulge the desires of Foreign Affairs flunkies who want to play at geopolitics.

What explains all these mistakes and misunderstandings? A seventh: Mr. Chretien and his government are steeped in mistrust of, if not outright hostility to, the United States. Recall David Collenette's nostalgia for the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was around to keep the Americans from "getting their elbows up." Recall Mr. Chretien's own musings about how, in a world with only one superpower, the United Nations was "more needed than ever." Perhaps it is not the virtues of multilateralism, or the horrors of war, that explain Mr. Chretien's behaviour, but simply reflex aversion to American power. That's a position, I suppose. But it's hardly a policy.