Early this week as the US, Britain and Spain pushed a new UN Security Council resolution that would give Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government an ultimataum to fully disarm by March 17 or face war, France and Russia said they would veto it should it pass.

Western media commentators are horrified that France should even contemplate vetoing the US-Britain backed resolution. They told us, almost hysterically, that it would be a serious blow to the Western alliance.

Therefore, some concluded, France's threat was just brinkmanship to put pressure on the US and that it would back down at the last minute.

The US and Britain knew better and postponed a call for the vote. UN vetoes are not a big deal. They are very common. The attempt to make a likely French veto look unprecedented is perhaps part of the ongoing propaganda war over Iraq.

However, those with a sense of history will want to separate the facts from the propaganda chaff.

Secondly, it is critical to understand the arguments of those who say a French-Russian veto and an American attack on Iraq despite it would spell an end to the post-World War international order.

Since 1958, some 250 vetoes have been cast in the Security Council. Russia (as the nub of the Soviet Union) has flexed its veto muscle the most, 120 times. The US is bbsecond with 76 vetoes.

The US has been the solo voice blocking UN Security Council resolutions the most, 53 times. Many countries criticise it for "unreasonable bias" in favour of Israel.

Since 1948, there have been 58 resolutions that deal with the Palestine-Israel issue.

The US has vetoed 24 resolutions on Palestine that were critical of Israel.

While many people think the veto is an anachronism that has been mostly abused by the Permanent members of the Security Council, it has been a valuable tool with all its imperfections because the world simply didn't have a better tool.

Because it worked on the principle that it was better to have both the good and the bad guys inside the house throwing the stones out than leaving them outside to throw stones inwards, it ensured that no action that a nuclear power didn't like was enforced. It thus avoided a major global conflict.

If the world had pressed on 120 times with actions that Moscow had vetoed, or gone ahead on 76 times to enforce something the US had vetoed, we would probably have had another conflict equivalent to World War in the second half of the 20th century.

On the brighter side, though unfair, the system provided a certain amount of predictability. However, if the US were to proceed to attack Iraq after a war resolution had been vetoed, it would make all its previous vetoes illegitimate.

It couldn't turn around to require UN members to respect its vetoes on resolutions against Israel. And in future, a UN vote would count for nothing.

And the US and Britain could not credibly persist at the same time with accusing Saddam of ignoring the numerous Security Councils resolutions calling on him to disarm.

All Saddam would have to do is say, just like the US, is that he doesn't have to respect these resolutions because they are not in his country's interest.

The complexity of the international crisis growing from the stand-off with Iraq is demonstrated by the fact that, even pacifists and those who support war but think it's wrong in this instance, cannot merely go to bed happy that they have done the right thing by opposing actions that might kill thousands of ordinary Iraqis and leave many more homeless.

For example, France and its allies must ask themselves if preventing an attack against Iraq is so important that the US and Britain have to be pushed into a corner where they must go to war despite a veto of their latest resolution – and wreck the only international mechanism for restraining potentially dangerous actions by states.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has tried to make a moral case for the overthrow of Saddam. The new Blair doctrine is that if a country feels it has a moral case to go to war, then it should do so even if the majority of the world doesn't agree with it and the UN has not, by its rules, sanctioned it.

One example of that is apartheid South Africa. The US and Britain blocked over 12 UN resolutions against apartheid South Africa. These vetoes and the near-powerlessness of Africans to change the views of official Washington and London, which favoured minority rule in South Africa, were very painful.

To add insult to injury, though the South African regime was immoral, for many decades it had the diplomatic leverage that the anti-apartheid forces did not. And it was militarily stronger than those who had the superior moral argument.