Unlike the House of Commons, which dribbles back to work for one day next week, the European Parliament came back from its summer holidays three weeks ago. The mood has been sombre, dictated by the problem of what to do with wicked Saddam Hussein.

As military tension mounts, it is clear that if the USA goes to war with Iraq, either alone or with only the backing of the UK, Europe’s relations with America will be in a terrible crisis. The transatlantic partnership has been one of the constants of European life since 1940. It still matters. But now our common institutions, notably NATO and the United Nations, are in danger of being undermined by American adventurism. It will not wash with the Europeans to argue that a blitz against Baghdad is the only way to save the UN when America and Britain have resisted its reform for far too long.

The European Union will not agree to imposing 'regime change' in Iraq by military means when there are yet diplomatic avenues that have to be explored, let alone exhausted. Saddam has conceded that UN weapons inspectors will be allowed back into Iraq on one condition or another. The existing sanctions regime against Iraq can be smartened up. The Iraqi opposition may become more effective, even lucky. Russia could be persuaded to swing in more determinedly behind the West. And no single act would lighten tension more than a concerted effort by the US, backed wholly by the EU, to set up an independent Palestinian state and to stem the current spate of Israeli and Palestinian violence.

To most MEPs it does not seem right to be obsessed by Saddam Hussein when the war against terrorism in Afghanistan and Pakistan is still far from complete. Our early hope that America would adopt a measured, multilateral response to 11 September now looks like being dashed.

The British prime minister must respect the caution of his European partners and deal with it in the diplomatic and democratic ways the EU provides. If Mr Blair is not able to win round his European partners, Britain should stand aside from the American battle of ‘self-defence’, as Vice-President Cheney calls it, against Iraq.