The UN is not dead yet: it still has the power to hold America to account

You could almost have imagined that the past four weeks had never happened. It is a Tuesday afternoon in New York and the UN Security Council is meeting behind closed doors, listening to the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, explaining why his teams should be allowed to resume their search for illegal weapons in Iraq.

There is the same rush to the microphones by the same UN ambassadors after the meeting, the same recriminations and pretty much the same divergence between the United States and the rest – the only variation being that the British are shuffling uncomfortably in the direction of the French, who are trying, for once, to sound co-operative.

In Iraq, however, everything has changed. The regime of Saddam Hussein is no more. American troops are in Baghdad, the British are in Basra. A million Iraqis have flocked to worship at the world's fourth most holy Shia shrine and the retired American general appointed by the Pentagon to administer the country is being fêted by grateful Kurds.

Just one month ago, the UN Security Council and the weapons inspectors seemed to hold the key to Iraq's future. Now, from Baghdad, as from Washington, they both look irrelevant. The war, and the victory, are done deeds. Might – it seems – has won over right, and the UN has been exposed as the sham that the US administration maintained it was all along. President Bush is now calling for the 12-year-old UN sanctions on Iraq to be lifted.

The logic is simple. Given that the sanctions were imposed to restrain the old regime, and the old regime is now gone, what justification can there be for keeping them in place? And while we are at it, why not go the whole hog – just pack up the vast building on the East River, and accept that the whole noble project of international law and multilateral action has failed? Let's just accept the reality of American power and give Iraq the fresh start that it so clearly needs and deserves.

Fortunately, at least from the perspective of all those countries that do not possess the military might to impose their will as they choose, the UN still has a lot more life in it than its detractors like to think, and a lot more clout as well. The very fact that Mr Bush has had to ask the Security Council to lift sanctions on Iraq shows that the cause of multilateralism is not lost. Even with the regime gone, the US cannot just decide to disregard the sanctions and declare Iraq open for business. The world does not – yet – work like that.

The power to lift the sanctions belongs to those who imposed them – the international community, as represented by the Security Council. And until that time, a host of legal questions will complicate doing business with Iraq – questions that will deter the big players, including the multinationals whose investment and trade Iraq so desperately needs.

Worse, from the US point of view, the Security Council set very specific conditions for lifting the sanctions. Before being free to trade, Iraq has to be certified as being free of illegal weapons – those very same weapons of mass destruction that Dr Blix's inspectors and their many predecessors have failed to find. The Security Council could, of course, waive some or all of those conditions. After watching its will flouted by the Americans and their small band of allies on 17 March, however, the majority is probably in no mood to do so. Let them twist in the wind a little longer, they must be thinking; let them know that even their power has limits.

In fact, France is proposing the outline of a compromise, suggesting the gradual suspension of sanctions in return for trade monitored by the UN. The sanctions would not be finally ended, however, until UN weapons inspectors were back at work. With this proposal, supported by Russia and probably the same majority of other members that opposed the war, France has impaled the US on an elegantly effective hook.

The US can declare the sanctions dead, just as they can send their own inspectors into Iraq. Without international recognition, however – that is, without validation by the UN – neither move will produce the effect Washington wants, or the benefits that the Iraqis so urgently need.

For as long as Iraq is "occupied" and has no internationally recognised government, foreign companies will not conclude trade deals, because ownership of property and natural resources remains moot. The rebuilding contracts that the Bush administration is dispensing to its friends are different, because they are guaranteed by the US government. With Iraq's oil, on the other hand, foreign companies do not want to risk having to pay twice, or more, for the same barrel. Similarly with the inspections; even if US inspection teams turn up the chemical and biological substances the US and Britain are so convinced are concealed, the discoveries will inevitably remain suspect without independent validation. Such is the price of unilateralism.

At the root of the problem is the questionable legality of the war. Most of the dissenters, led by France, regarded the use of military force as illegal. The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, was more circumspect, warning that the legality of military action without a specific UN resolution could be "diminished". The British Government tied itself in knots to show that the war was, strictly speaking, legal. The US indicated that Iraq's non-compliance with past UN resolutions was justification enough for using force.

That disputed prelude to the war and Washington's reluctance to involve the UN afterwards mean that the US/British occupation and General Garner's interim administration lack wider recognition. The fact that no individual or group snatched central power from Saddam Hussein, and all the apparatus of his power was smashed, is another complication. Unlike, for instance, the Soviet Union, which dissolved into its constituent republics, or the former Communist countries in Europe, Iraq currently has no "successor" regime that can be accorded international recognition and that the country's sovereignty can reside in.

In theory, it is open to the UN Security Council to withhold recognition for anything that the occupying powers do in Iraq. Once military action began, the French, Russians and others warned that they would agree nothing that constituted the "retrospective legitimisation" of what they regarded as America's war. In practice – as this week's move by France indicates – the Security Council will eventually recognise a new administration in Iraq.

But that recognition will be progressive and conditional. It will come into force only as Washington agrees to involvement by the UN in Iraq's future – not just in aid distribution and reconstruction, but in the political arrangements for an interim government and in the verification of Iraq's disarmament, whether those illegal weapons are found or not. This is no mean amount of power. Who says the Security Council is finished?

m.dejevsky@independent.co.uk