It has been clear from the outset that although Britain and the US are bound together by their common interest in appearing to be united on the Iraq issue, they have had somewhat different ideas of how to handle this problem.
In order to avoid seeming globally isolated, the US needed British involvement and participation in the eventual war. But because American need for British support was less strong that Britain's desire to stay close to the US, even at the cost of having to face down domestic popular and political opposition to a war, the balance between the two states was unequal from the start.
During the second World War, Britain was effectively bankrupted by the US, which ruthlessly took almost all of its overseas assets in payment for wartime aid. This explains why Britain was so much slower to recover from that war than other states, including some that had been defeated. The US administration also adopted a vigorous anti-colonial stance, which culminated in American blockage of the Franco-British invasion of Egypt in 1956. And the US excluded Britain from participation in its post-war nuclear armament programme.
But, despite all these negative elements in its relationship with the US, Britain has stubbornly persisted in seeking to maintain its "special relationship" with the superpower across the Atlantic. One benefit from this, to which Britain clearly attaches huge importance, is the sharing of intelligence.
However, it has to be said that the intensity of Tony Blair's support for armed action against Iraq clearly reflects a personal commitment that runs beyond a concern simply to maintain this special relationship.
Blair seems genuinely to believe in the continued existence within Iraq of material capable of use for purposes of mass destruction, (by terrorists at least, if not in missiles), and also in the danger that Saddam Hussein might at some point give some of these materials to al-Qaeda.
An additional reason for his deep involvement in this affair has been his belief that, in a way not open to other European leaders, he had some capacity to persuade the US to approach this problem in a measured way, one that might eventually achieve an agreed international approach under UN auspices. Here, however, he clearly miscalculated.
True, with the support of Colin Powell, and despite the opposition of hard-liners in the US administration, he secured Bush's reluctant agreement to go to the UN. But he overestimated the amount of patience Bush would show with the slow working of diplomacy at and through the UN. And he also made the mistake of believing that the French and Russians, with their German allies, would eventually cave in to US pressure lest otherwise they might not get a share of Iraqi oil after the war.
This assumption that France's motivation was simply materialistic in a narrow sense seems to have reflected a British failure to understand that, as has been the case for decades past, France's primary concern is rather with what it sees as the danger of a unilateralist US coming to dominate the globe.
This second miscalculation accounts for the bitterness of the British reaction to France's threatened veto. The British government seems to be furious because the French did not live down to Britain's simplistic assumption as to their motivation!
What appear to have been two major British miscalculations have had the effect of inflicting huge damage on that country's already difficult relationship with France and Germany, and this does not bode well for the immediate future of the European project. At the same time, Britain may as a result also have lost leverage with the US, where Bush and his hardliners must be kicking themselves that they ever accepted the Blair-Powell argument for trying the UN route.
Britain would clearly have preferred some compromise between the two sides at the UN - involving perhaps a delay of some weeks in the initiation of hostilities combined with a commitment by France and its allies to agree to armed action at the end of that period - if the inspectors had reported continuing Iraqi failure to give full co-operation, particularly in accounting for the chemical and biological weapons that had previously existed and which the Iraqis claimed they had destroyed.
Such a compromise, involving a three-week delay, was in fact put forward by Chile in the closing days of the UN negotiations, and there is reason to believe that this was supported by Britain. But, ignoring the British stance, the US simply told Chile it would not accept this proposal.
The blame for the failure of the Chilean initiative was then hastily shifted to the French, with the British latching on to an apparently uncompromising rejection by Chirac of a quite separate British "benchmark" proposal.
The subsequent Azores meeting and America's immediate rush to war obscured several facts: first, that the French had immediately softened the tone of Chirac's over-rapid negative response to Britain, and, second, that by blocking the Chilean proposal the US never allowed the French any chance to say whether they would in fact have accepted armed action at the end of the proposed delay period.
Perhaps they wouldn't have been willing to do so. But if the Chilean proposal had been allowed to run, and if the French had rejected it, the US-British stance would have been strengthened; while, of course, if France had agreed to it, the breach between the five veto-yielding powers would have been healed.
Finding himself engaged in a war that has been rejected by France, Germany, Russia and China, Tony Blair has recently shifted his attention to the post-war situation in Iraq. This week's Camp David meeting with Bush clearly involved an attempt by Blair to make some progress on this issue.
It is not clear that he has done so. For, while he has continued to stress the need for UN authorisation for the eventual governance of Iraq, Blair appears to have backed away from any commitment to a UN role in the reconstruction of that country, which the US seems determined to see undertaken by American companies, apparently even to the exclusion of British ones. That is not a happy outcome for Britain.