Is it possible that Mr Blair will not back President Bush over Iraq?

Britain has tended to side with the multilateralist, coalition-building approach of Secretary of State Colin Powell

If there was nothing to talk about at present on Iraq, Tony Blair and King Abdullah II of Jordan would not have discussed it yesterday. That simple fact is part of what fuels the entirely reasonable call for the issue to be debated widely now – a call best expressed by Baroness Williams of Crosby last week when she complained with incontestable logic that it was always too early to debate a war until it was too late. Part of the deep anxiety that she reflects concerns precisely the question of whether Mr Blair's reluctance to engage in such a debate means that he will support the United States whatever it eventually decides to do.

For the moment, you have to suppose that behind the rhetoric the Prime Minister is elaborating his determined expressions of support by at least drawing attention to a number of concerns that he refuses to share in public. There have certainly been generalised tensions between Washington and London in recent weeks. There was deep alarm throughout the British government over the 11th-hour call for the removal of Yasser Arafat in President Bush's 24 June speech on the Middle East. So far, the most public foreign policy fissure between London and Washington in Mr Blair's time remains, oddly, the one under President Clinton when the British Prime Minister was urging the ground troops option for Kosovo and a strongly resistant US administration made its deep irritation public.

But while such a crisis hasn't been reached, it could yet be. King Abdullah might have been speaking more for the street – in Amman and beyond – than for a British audience when he said in an interview before meeting Mr Blair yesterday that Jordan had no more idea of what it would do in the event of war than Britain and France – adding, remarkably: "All of us are saying: 'Hey, United States, we don't think this is a very good idea.'" But that doesn't alter the fact that there are common concerns in the governments of all three countries about the context in which an attack on Saddam might be launched.

These include, centrally, the question of whether President Bush is prepared to regard progress towards a Middle East political settlement as a precondition of an attack on Iraq. Or whether he is prepared to bow to the converse notion, fostered by the Washington hawks but held in deep suspicion, to put it mildly, in almost every European capital, that the removal of Saddam comes first because it will somehow unlock peace in the region.

They include, too, the question of how much time and diplomatic energy Washington is first prepared to deploy on the UN demand for Saddam to admit its inspectors. And they include the issue of whether a fresh UN mandate would be morally desirable, let alone necessary in international law, as the impressive new Archbishop of Canterbury, who also met Mr Blair yesterday, persuasively maintains.

On all these points, it is reasonable to assume, that Britain, like France, has tended to side with the multilateralist, coalition-building approach of the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, whom King Abdullah was at pains this weekend to depict as the man in Washington who "gets it" about the Middle East. Although British officials stoutly maintain that "bolstering Colin Powell" is too simplistic a way to describe British policy, the Secretary of State has certainly invoked London's support more than once in arguments he has been having in Washington with the unilateralist hawks clustered in and around the Department of Defence.

Nor is the careful, coalition-building option necessarily a hopeless cause. It's not simply that some of the senior US military have reportedly been expressing doubts about too hasty an incursion into Iraq. It's also, conversely, that the evolving climate in Europe is more complex than it looks at first sight. The common assumption is that Mr Blair cannot support war in Iraq without breaking with the rest of the EU. But there are tentative indications, for example, that President Jacques Chirac, seeking to repair, in the wake of his election triumph, relations with the US, may be prepared to offer support, however qualified.

There has even been muttering around the more hawkish elements of the US administration that Mr Blair sometimes seem less gung ho than – say – the President's other best European buddy, Jose Maria Aznar (whose perceived bellicosity is qualified because Spain's military significance to any war in Iraq is negligible compared to that of the British). More pertinently still, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, is actively seeking a deepening entente with America that could embrace a military attempt to remove Saddam.

None of this means, however that there won't be deeply painful, and for Mr Blair, politically, as well as militarily, dangerous decisions down the track. Mr Blair often justifies his stance on Iraq by reference to his 14 September Commons statement last year in which he referred to weapons of mass destruction. In fact, this referred rather narrowly to the threat that terrorists would acquire such weapons. That doesn't make military action on Iraq unjustifiable; but it certainly leaves room for further discussion. No, the best justification of the refusal to engage in early parliamentary debate is the fluidity of the decision-making process in Washington, a process to which every other government remains in the end an engaged spectator. The overwhelming probability, of course, is that action will happen. But no one can be sure how the debate on means, timing and context will be resolved.

The hugely popular Mr Powell is in a very powerful position; his resignation – a prospect dismissed in London – would be a body blow to the administration. But how far will he push his multilateralist vision? And will he prevail? He has swallowed a good deal already – from the first, more malign, half of the 24 June speech, to the hostile switch of Iran policy away from aiding the reformers under President Mohammad Khatami, to the decision to cut off finance for the UN population fund. In a ringing editorial yesterday The New York Times urged him to stand his ground on a series of foreign policy issues, including Iraq, but without certainty that he will do so.

Which brings the issue of British influence, or lack of it, into the sharpest focus. Supposing the President launches an attack without the fresh UN cover that a majority of the Security Council want and could probably provide, without real progress in the Middle East, and with no coalition to speak of? Hope it will not happen.

But if it does, that's the point at which Mr Blair could not offer his country's support for the US without creating, at incalculable cost, fissures not only within his own Cabinet but with Europe. British influence on the most important foreign policy issue for a generation would be seen to have failed. The UN, in the age in which it is most urgently needed, would have been abandoned. And it would be up to the British Prime Minister to recognise that without influence there is no point left in being a poodle.

d.macintyre@independent.co.uk