So how would you stop Saddam without going to war?

'There is unease in Labour ranks. Iraq is the focal point for those who think Blair is too supportive of Bush'

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If a week is a long time in domestic politics, four months is a very long time indeed in the struggle for global security. Exactly a month to the day after 11 September, in a tent at the al-Sha'afa military camp in Oman, a senior British official travelling with Tony Blair went out of his way to emphasise that there was no evidence linking Iraq with the attacks on New York and Washington.

It was clear that the firm intention of the British Government, with the bombing of Afghanistan by now under way, was to allay mounting suspicion among Muslim members of the anti-terror coalition that the Western allies were about to widen the war to Iraq. Compare and contrast Tony Blair's remarks on Australian television over the weekend, and the Government's promised dossier of Iraq's record of accumulating weapons of mass destruction. Iraq, and its potential for nuclear, chemical and biological warfare, he emphasised, was not a matter for the US alone, but "something we have to deal with".

The issue, therefore, is no longer whether any direct connection is established – it has not been – between Iraq and the events of 11 September. It's the threat, regional and global, that the British Prime Minister and the US President believe that Iraq represents.

Thus Iraq has become the new focal point for those who criticise Mr Blair for being too loyal towards Washington. There is real unease about it within the Labour Party, some of which is likely to surface in a Commons debate on the subject tomorrow. Some of this has been communicated to Mr Blair. For many Labour MPs, the perils of war against Iraq are much less acceptable, particularly without the specific casus belli that applied to war with the Taliban.

Nor is the more generalised unease about US policy confined to the Labour Party. It even includes part of the defence establishment. Charles Grant, the Director of the Centre for European Reform, and a leading European defence expert, quotes, in the current issue of Prospect, an unnamed senior Ministry of Defence figure saying: "In order to help the US war effort, we are spending large amounts of money – for example, by providing air tankers for US aircraft – and we are putting the lives of our special forces at risk. And yet, in return, the Americans do not listen to a word we say and frequently create difficulties, whether on the organisation of the peacekeeping force in Kabul or any other military matter. I have to ask whether it in the national interest that we should go on offering such unstinting support."

Despite its deserved reputation as the most hawkish and pro-American department, relations between the MoD and the Pentagon have not been that smooth in recent months. Nevertheless, these are strong words.

What is needed, however, is some deconstruction, some separation of the critiques of the US in general since President Bush's "axis of evil" speech from critiques of their specific intentions towards Iraq. On the latter, it looks increasingly as if Mr Blair, true to his record of offering strong support in public and expressing any differences in private, has calculated that the US is determined to step up the pressure on Iraq and that nothing is to be gained from attacking a strategy you can't prevent. This may not be quite as rash as it looks to many in the Labour Party, particularly since keeping open the option of a military campaign may increase your chances, however slim, of securing your goals without having, in the end, to mount one. For the question is not so much whether the pressure will be applied, but how.

The British Foreign Office, at least, has set considerable store on the negotiations, which will come to a head in the next two months, for the so-called "smart sanctions" UN regime, which the Russians, partly for commercial reasons, have so far declined to countenance. But they would have the double advantage of further reducing the export of hardware with military potential while also expanding the export of medical and food supplies, to an extent which would make it much more difficult for Saddam to claim that Iraqi children are dying because of UN sanctions.

Whether such a sanctions regime would be enough to persuade Saddam to readmit UN weapons inspectors is a moot point. The point is rather that such a regime is, at least to most European eyes, a vital first step in applying further pressure on Baghdad. But it must be asked: how well-prepared is Washington for the diplomatic niceties required to bring the Russians on board for such a regime? And, when it comes to Iraq, how much does Washington care about maintaining the coalition at all?

For the point here is not that it isn't possible to construct such a coalition, but that it quite possibly is. When Chris Patten spoke for much of Europe in his critique of the Bush "axis of evil" speech, he did so with greater subtlety than he has been given credit for. Indeed, he distinguished between the agreed need to get the weapons inspectors back and support the opposition in Iraq, and the lack of wisdom of some of the speech's other elements, including the failure to acknowledge the powerful democratic and reformist pressures in Iran and the need for dialogue with the Palestinians.

It may be, in other words, that those who resolutely oppose any action against Iraq are making the wrong point. To say that wiping out the Taliban is right but that stopping Saddam's continued defiance of international and democratic opinion is wrong is a form of moral relativism that is not, in the end, so easy to apply. But the real criticism of the more hawkish elements in Washington is that they appear, at times, dangerously uninterested in a more enlightened approach towards Iran or to Israeli-Palestinian dialogue that might create support for its toughening stance on Iraq. Deep down, the division between Europe and Washington over Israel and Palestine may be more fundamental – though less visible – than that over Iraq.

When President Chirac was telephoned by Tony Blair shortly after 11 September, he is said to have remarked that Europe would support an attack on Afghanistan, but not on Iraq. But France, whose commercial links with Saddam's regime are well attested, supports a new sanctions regime. They might even be prepared to go further if the US took a more multilateralist stance towards other, related issues, including the embryonic Saudi peace plan for the Middle East. If anything, a more plausible Labour lament against Tony Blair may be that he has all but stopped making – admittedly in the face of appalling carnage on both sides – the impressive calls for dialogue in Israel-Palestine he issued in the weeks after 11 September.

The cause worth fighting for, in other words, is not so much the elimination of the threat of military action – at least, as the last resort – against Iraq. For it's a case that invites the hard question: what would you do instead?

Rather, it is the achievement of the international conditions in which pressure, up to and including military action, can be brought against Iraq, without the US, and perhaps Britain, dangerously going it alone.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk