The immediate focus for action against Iran is the International Atomic Energy Agency, which has produced five reports on Iran in the past 14 months. Part of the U.N., with an international board that acts like a mini-Security Council, the IAEA’s reports have raised questions about Iran’s professedly civilian nuclear program and its desire to create its own fuel cycle, which could eventually be used to produce bombs.

To satisfy its critics, Iran agreed last year to allow so-called intrusive inspections. As a confidence-building measure, it also stopped enriching uranium. In a few days’ time the IAEA will issue a new report, and it is its wording that is causing the latest flurry. John Bolton, the Bush administration’s point man, has been rushing round Europe claiming the evidence of sinister Iranian behavior is clear, even though the IAEA has consistently made no such judgment. It has called for more transparency, but prefers to keep probing and, like Hans Blix and the U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq in 2003, insists it needs more time.

Iran, meanwhile, says the IAEA should accept that nothing wrong has been found, close the dossier and let Iran receive the civilian nuclear technology — with the safeguards that go with it — that countries like Germany and France have promised.

Bolton is not, at this stage, claiming to have intelligence that the IAEA’s inspectors don’t. After the fiasco of the United States’ prewar material on Iraq, he has not started to trumpet U.S. sources. But he is choosing to interpret the available knowledge as harshly as possible. He is also close to the Washington hard-liners in the Project for the New American Century, who created the doctrine of preemptive strikes against unfriendly states and who favor regime change to deal with Islamist fundamentalism.

Norman Podhoretz, the archconservative editor of Commentary magazine, one of their house journals, said last week: “I am not advocating the invasion of Iran at this moment, although I wouldn’t be heartbroken if it happened.”

There are differences from the anti-Iraq campaign two years ago. This time the U.S. is taking the lead in going to the U.N. Bolton wants the IAEA board to say Iran has violated its commitments under the nuclear nonproliferation treaty and take the matter to the Security Council for a decision on sanctions or other stern action. France and Germany are resisting a move to the U.N.

Second, even the U.S. (Podhoretz excepted) is not talking about a full-scale U.S. invasion with ground troops. It has too many soldiers tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan to spare many for a third campaign. The talk is of using U.S. Special Forces or airstrikes to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities, or giving a green light to Israel to do it. Slightly less impatiently, there are hints that the CIA will step up its campaign to overthrow the regime in Tehran by encouraging anti-government TV and radio broadcasts from abroad and infiltrating opposition movements.

The biggest difference, though, is in Britain’s stance. Unlike with the Bush campaign against Saddam Hussein, Britain is siding this time with France and Germany. It is part of a “troika” that promotes constructive engagement rather than confrontation with Iran. Their dialogue ran into a sticky phase this summer with allegations of bad faith on both sides, but the three European states are willing to keep it going.

They have powerful arguments. The disaster of the Iraq war and the failure to bring peace, stability or order make them want no repetition in Iraq’s more populous and larger neighbor. Even “limited” airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities would unify the country and harden hostility to the West throughout the Middle East, especially if Washington subcontracted the attacks to the Israeli air force.

Most Iraqi resistance to the Americans is based on nationalist resentment, and Iranians are no different. People of all political persuasions in Tehran support their country’s right to have nuclear power, and probably even bombs. Threatening them with force is not the most intelligent way to persuade them otherwise.

The defeat of Iran’s reformist M.P.’s in this spring’s unfair elections, as well as the certainty that President Mohammed Khatami will be replaced by a less liberal figure next year, has not ended the chance of dialogue with Tehran. European diplomats detect the emergence of a group of “pragmatic conservatives” in the Iranian leadership who could be easier to deal with than the beleaguered liberals of the past seven years. Many are nonclerical veterans of the Iran-Iraq war who are influenced by nationalism and economic imperatives more than the revolutionary Islamic ideology of the Khomeini generation. They want better relations with the West.

Britain’s difference with Washington on Iran is remarkable. It matters more than the better-publicized splits on the Kyoto environmental protocol or the international criminal court. But does Britain’s alignment with France and Germany on Iran mean that Tony Blair has really parted with George Bush on a key geopolitical and military issue? Or has he not yet spotted that what he regards as the lily-livered flunkies in the Foreign Office are up to their “realist” tricks again? They also opposed the invasion of Iraq until Ol’ Laser Eyes in Downing Street focused on the file.

We will know the answer after the U.S. election. Even if John Kerry wins, European diplomats expect no major change in Washington’s policy toward Iran. Like Cuba, Iran produces special symptoms of irrationality (because of the unrevenged wound to U.S. pride the mullahs caused when they held diplomats hostage in the U.S. Embassy a quarter of a century ago).

So how will Blair cuddle up to the new president? What easier way than to break with France and Germany and show Kerry that whether there’s a Democrat or a Republican in the White House, Britain’s prime minister is still best friends when it comes to being tough with Islamist bullies and taking the brave and moral route to war? Inshallah, no.

One reason is television, which increasingly sets the agenda for newspapers as well as governments. If there is no image there is no message, so political negotiations are condemned as inherently dull, if not irrelevant, compared to the visual drama of war. The other is the cult of impatience, caused by the new craze for humanitarian intervention and the excessive injection of morality into international disputes. If a conflict is projected as a struggle against evil-doers, then there is not a moment to lose. Delay itself becomes a form of moral appeasement and wickedness. When military action is crowned with rapid results and the bad guys’ defeat, as in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, the illusion is created that a solution has been reached.

The current media-driven push for military intervention in Sudan’s western province of Darfur has all the hallmarks of the run-up to the west’s last three wars. The fact that none has yet produced stability or justice is overlooked.

The narrative in Darfur, which has been told repeatedly in recent weeks, is not new. Douglas Johnson’s authoritative study, The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars, describes how war has been going on in Darfur at a low level among different groups of herdsmen and farmers for two decades. Successive Arab-led governments in Khartoum took sides, using Janjaweed militias, designated in 1989 as popular defence forces, who targeted villagers, killed and displaced civilians, and burned crops while the divide between “Arabs” and “Blacks” was deliberately sharpened.

What has changed is the emergence of two ambitious rebel movements with political agendas, their decision to launch surprise attacks on government garrisons, and Khartoum’s over-reaction with the use of air power and helicopter gunships. The government also gave a green light to the Janjaweed for widespread raids on villages that support the rebels.

In spite of this disastrous escalation, a peace process has begun. Not many conflicts of this intensity have a channel for negotiations as well as international observers to try to keep them on track. Getting talks started while fighting is under way is usually a major hurdle.

In having a peace track Darfur is lucky, though one would not know it from most media commentaries, with their impatience for sanctions or military action.

Virtually every report of last week’s UN security council resolution, which gave Sudan 30 days to show progress in disarming the Janjaweed, avoided mention of a para- graph which made demands on the rebels too. It criticised their leaders’ boycott of the latest peace talks. It urged them to stop their ceasefire violations and drop all preconditions for attending the next round of talks under African Union sponsorship.

Darfur is also lucky in that the gap between the parties is not as wide as in many conflicts. Neither rebel movement is calling for independence. This is not Kosovo or Chechnya. A model for the autonomy they want for their western region exists in the deal reached this year between Khartoum and the southern rebels. To expand that agreement to take in Darfur or forge one on the southern formula of decentralisation and wealth-sharing ought not to be too hard.

Diplomats and experts on Sudan say the rebel movements are not clear who to designate as leaders, or how representative the current spokespeople are. Some hesitate to attend talks for fear of being exposed or denounced. Another problem is that the rebels may think they can get their way, in the present climate of anti-Khartoum moralising, without compromise or long-term thinking.

In any hostile intervention a key test is regional backing. On Kosovo, though there was no UN mandate for war, European governments took the initiative for military action. There was no comparable backing for the US-led wars on Afghanistan and Iraq from most of those countries’ neighbours. Similarly in Darfur, the African Union has no interest in military interference against Khartoum’s wishes, especially now that the government has agreed to an African ceasefire monitoring force.

So, instead of talk of western military intervention, pressure needs to be put on the rebels to pick genuine representatives and get to the negotiating table. The Sudanese government is also divided  between hardliners who hope for military victory if the talks fail and those willing to listen to the African Union. Khartoum bears primary responsibility for the excessive use of force. But division among the rebels is the major obstacle to restoring the peace process.

Like Sudan until the Darfur eruption, Sri Lanka was one of the world’s few good-news stories of 2002-03. There too, after a long civil war between the Singhalese majority and Tamil Tiger rebels, international mediation produced a ceasefire and peace talks.

Now they are under threat. The culprits are not western television or impatient humanitarian interventionists. A small island with no oil or strategic value, Sri Lanka was largely ignored in war and peace. Even a death toll of 64,000 over 18 years made little impact abroad. Its problems are internal. On the Singhalese side the peace talks, mediated by Norway, were treated as a political football.

President Chandrika Kumaratunga claimed the government had made too many concessions, and got her party back in power by appealing to nationalists.

On the Tigers’ side, a split between the northern and eastern leaderships has become a campaign of assassinations, which has raised anxieties about their willingness to accept democracy. Meanwhile, the army made links with the eastern rebels. The Tigers’ northern leaders accuse it of not backing a return to peace talks which have been suspended for 18 months.

In strong terms for mediators, the Norwegians denounce both sides’ “incredible complacency”. “What we’re seeing now is a frozen war that is starting to melt at the edges”, as their envoy Vidar Helgesen puts it. The island’s slip back to war shows how difficult it is  even with no Darfur-style foreign clamour  to get a political settlement without calm and effective leadership, preparation of public opinion and transparency.

An evening in the Yarmuk hospital in western Baghdad is like a microcosm of Iraq’s tense, no-holds-barred society; aggression, corruption, shortages and courageous efforts by a few people to improvise solutions.

It is also a window on the random violence which faces the capital’s residents from bombs, street gangs and kidnappers.

In one bed lies a young man shot in the back in a quarrel between two families. Two police officers sit on another bed. One is bleeding from the mouth, the other has gashes on his forehead. They were attacked while arresting a street gang.

Three uniformed members of Iraq’s National Guard run in with a captain bandaged above his left eye. Someone hit him on the head, apparently without provocation. The doctors redress the wound. “At least they’re getting out now and doing something,” says Dr Adham Sadoun Hamid, with no great sympathy for the guardsmen.

Doctors are still pumping mucus and blood out of the stomach of the woman who was run over. “It’s an old problem,” says Dr Aws Wael al-Shehabi, when asked why relatives have to fetch the basic supplies he needs. “The pharmacies have always wanted to keep control of drugs and other supplies. Probably they sell some of it out of the back door.”

Guards carrying Kalashnikov semi-automatic rifles regularly enter the ward. Others control the hospital entrance. They provide protection against looters and thieves, but their job is also to defend doctors from angry relatives if patients fail to recover quickly. “Family members should be told to sit in the foyer, but we can’t stop them crowding in,” says Dr Aws Wael, helplessly.

The woman’s pulse is getting weaker. Oxygen is pumped into her lungs. Two senior doctors who have been summoned from their rounds upstairs recommend she be taken to the neurosurgical hospital because of bleeding in her head.

A relative goes out and offers a fee to an ambulance driver to take her there. Relatives help the doctors lift the women on to the ambulance stretcher, leaving the oxygen supply behind. The doctors seem relieved when she is gone, hopeful that if she dies at the other hospital or on the way, they should be safe from any vengeful relatives.

Yarmuk’s chaos is not unique. Visits to two other Baghdad hospitals, each the country’s best in its field, reveal similar problems and shortages. At the central teaching hospital for children, all 24 beds in the gastroenteritis section are full and drug shortages are severe. “We have to ask parents to buy things for their children themselves,” says Dr Rasha Jawed.

Only two of the ward’s four rooms have air conditioners. The others have two fans, but they do little to reduce the 46C (115F) heat. Some parents bring their own. The surgical department’s respiratory cardiological unit closed last month because one of its two ventilators broke, and it has not been replaced.

Dirt
The floors and windows are dirty. “The hospital needs 100 cleaners, but we only have 20. They get a miserable 60,000 dinars [#22] a month. I don’t know why it’s so little,” says Dr Mohamed Idris.

The four hospitals in Baghdad’s Medical City complex used to be the pride of the Arab world. Patients came from all over the Gulf and beyond. A decade of sanctions started the slide, but little ground has been made up in the 15 months since Saddam Hussein was toppled.

At the surgical hospital, Dr Mohamed Ghiath, 28, an anaesthetist, has just finished attending an operation on a bodyguard for the minister of justice, whose convoy was attacked by a suicide bomber. The minister escaped unhurt, but the explosion killed four bodyguards and wounded several others.

“We had no triangular needles for sutures. We only had one-way cannulas, which means you can put new blood in but not suck anything out,” he says.

There have been two big changes since Saddam’s time. Doctors’ pay has gone up from $3 (#1.65) to $200 a month, and the medical fees which Saddam introduced five years ago have been scrapped. Now inpatient care is free. But drug supplies are still erratic, and the occupation authorities have spent little money to remedy the problem. Fear of corruption deters them and Britain’s aid to Iraq concentrates on primary healthcare. Iraq’s new UK-trained heath minister, Dr Ala’adin Alwan, acknowledges there is mismanagement and corruption, with drugs “leaking” out of hospitals to be sold in the street.

He says he needs to double the annual #550m budget to rebuild the health sector and tackle drug shortages after years of sanctions. “There are urgent issues that we need to address. One is the shortage we have in medicines and also in emergency supplies.”

He cites a lack of drugs for cardiovascular diseases, diabetes and cancer, as well as antibiotics and those medicines used to control communicable diseases. “There is a wide range of medicines where our stock is either zero or very, very small.”

Under Saddam, says Dr Ghiath, monitoring of corruption was stricter and punishments were fierce. But “with a salary of $3 doctors learned to steal”. The legacy of dishonesty has been compounded by the lawlessness, violence, and chaos of post-Saddam Iraq, he believes. “We’re no longer a unified country. Individuals just take whatever they can. This generation is lost. It’ll take a long time to change people’s mentality.”

Women doctors give the most pessimistic view. On top of their work problems, they have new security fears. “Patients’ relatives see there is no order, and no government, and they feel they can do anything,” says one who refused to give her name. “They swear, they smash windows, they hit doctors. We think this country has no future. We’re tired of waiting. We want to get out.”

Although car bombs and mortar attacks have become a regular feature in the capital, it was the first time running gun battles have taken place in daylight so close to the centre.

The emergency law has several built-in safeguards to prevent the risk of another one-man dictatorship. Article 12 states that it cannot be used to delay the national elections set for January. Article 11 says it cannot abrogate the interim constitution agreed in March.

This constitution point was demanded by Kurdish ministers who were upset last month when the UN security council approved the transfer of sovereignty but failed to mention the constitution, which protects Kurdish autonomy and gives Kurds certain veto rights.

The prime minister can only take the special powers after unanimous approval from the three-person presidency, which is led by a Sunni with Shia and Kurdish deputies.

The area covered by a state of emergency has to be spelt out clearly and it may only last for 60 days, subject to renewal for a further 30 days at a time.

The law was announced by the ministers of justice and human rights, who stressed they would monitor its use and punish any violations.

The justice minister, Malik Dohan al-Hassan, said: “We realise this law might restrict some liberties, but there are a number of guarantees. We have tried to guarantee justice and human rights.”

The prime minister will need warrants from an Iraqi court before ordering arrests and anyone detained must appear before a judge within 24 hours. It was not clear last night whether the new law applies to foreign troops, now known as the multinational forces. They regularly cordon off areas, search houses, conduct mass arrests, and hold prisoners incommunicado for weeks.

The battle in central Baghdad left four people dead. US armoured personnel carriers moved in and two Apache helicopters fired on buildings after insurgents initially attacked Iraqi police. In another part of Baghdad close to the green zone, four mortars landed yesterday morning near the headquarters of Mr Allawi’s political party, and a house he sometimes uses. Six people were injured.

The Arabic satellite channel al-Jazeera said yesterday an Iraqi group had captured a Filipino working in Iraq and was threatening to kill him unless Manila withdraws its force of 50 within 72 hours. It showed images of three gunmen and a man dressed in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in front of them. The group said it had already killed an Iraqi security guard accompanying the man.

Although US planes have dropped several bombs on the city of Falluja during operations mounted to find Mr Zarqawi, figures released yesterday suggest the role of foreign insurgents has been exaggerated. Foreigners amount to less than 2% of prisoners in the hands of the security forces. US officials say 90 of the 5,750 detainees in US control are foreign, half of them from Syria.