The Slate Saddameter (which I’ve been mis-spelling as Saddamometer), has the odds of war at 95 per cent. While war has obviously got closer (as witness my Freudian slip ‘first Gulf war’, picked up by c8t0 recently), I think Slate is underestimating the Blair problem, as it has done all along.

Saddam has already caved on the issue of private interviews with weapons inspectors, and will clearly do the same on U2 flights if he can get a positive report from Blix next week. The crucial issue, which has been at the centre of things all along, is the production of some documentary (or maybe eye-witness) evidence of weapons destruction. If Saddam delivers on this in some form (which would be possible assuming he’s destroyed at least some weapons), and Blix reports that he is getting satisfactory co-operation for the moment, things will get really interesting (in the sense of the ancient Chinese curse). There are some big ifs here, but I’d say the chances of these two things happening are closer to 50 per cent than 5 per cent, so I’ll proceed on this assumption.

Given a positive report from Blix, there’s no chance of the UNSC endorsing an immediate strike. On the other hand, it’s virtually certain that Bush will dismiss the report. This will leave Blair in an incredibly difficult position, not helped by the exposure of his fraudulent dossier on Iraqi intelligence. If he backs a US invasion in these circumstances, anything less than a best-case outcome (a quick victory, hardly any US or British casualties, modest Iraqi casualties, the exposure of a large-scale weapons program, succesful democratisation) will end his career and perhaps even the Labor government. On the other hand, refusing to back Bush will be exceptionally difficult. All of this applies equally to Howard and to other putative allies like the Turks.

Conversely, the risks for the UN are great. Should Bush bypass the UN and deliver the best-case outcome, the advocates of unilateralism in the US will be strengthened immeasurably (at least until they run out of money – see three posts down).

My own view is that, viewing the Iraq problem, in isolation, the best outcome is one where the pressure is kept as high as possible, as long as possible, without resorting to war. The difficulty is that the expenditure of political and diplomatic capital on this issue has come at the expense of more dangerous problems like OBL, Kim Jong-Il and Israel-Palestine.