President Clinton's claim to have forced President Saddam Hussein to back down in the present crisis will not have convinced the many sceptics who believe he should not have aborted his order to launch air strikes last Saturday.
There are those who believe the President now has the worst of all worlds with an ineffective UN weapons inspection, President Saddam still in place, and a huge US strike force in place but without a clear role.
For Mr Clinton, this is a false analysis. President Saddam has been forced to back down in the face of military action and will allow the UNSCOM inspectors to resume their work. He immediately added that this was "not enough".
Iraq will also have to "live up" to its obligations of full co-operation with UNSCOM. President Clinton warned that the US and its faithful ally, Britain, will remain poised to attack if necessary.
He also looked wistfully forward to a time when the scattered Iraqi political opposition will take over from Mr Saddam thanks to US financial aid and propaganda.
So what else is new? the sceptics ask. Have we not seen all this play out before last February when the US also sent a huge force of ships and aircraft to the Gulf region only to have them sent home when Mr Saddam backed off and allowed UNSCOM inspectors back?
As for the Iraqi opposition, all US efforts to build it up have been a total failure.
This time is different, insist Mr Clinton and his national security team, which had retired to rest last Friday night after the President had given the order authorising cruise missile strikes on Iraq to begin the next day. The US points out that in this crisis President Saddam was clearly isolated in the Arab world in his defiance of the UN resolutions, and he realised that he had overreached himself.
While critics may regret that the air strikes did not go ahead, President Clinton had offered Mr Saddam the way out the day before, and when he took it, it would have been hard for Mr Clinton to go ahead and bomb Iraq.
On Friday President Clinton told the world that "Saddam Hussein has it in his hands to end this crisis now by resuming full co-operation with UNSCOM."
With just one hour remaining before the missiles were launched, the Iraqi leader offered to do just that in a letter from his deputy prime minister, Mr Tariq Aziz, to the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan. The strike was called off as President Clinton's national security adviser, Mr Sandy Berger, scrutinised the letter and the annex in which the Iraqis laid down conditions for the review of UN sanctions which would be part of its agreement to allow back the inspectors.
The US found these conditions "unacceptable", but before the air strikes could be reordered, the Iraqi ambassador to the UN, Mr Nizar Hamdoon, had "clarified" that the annex did not lay down conditions for the return of the inspectors.
Mr Clinton then really had no choice but to suspend the threat of air strikes. He has been frank in acknowledging that it is better to have UNSCOM inspectors inside Iraq trying to eliminate weapons of mass destruction than bombing Iraq, which could mean their permanent exclusion.
The bombing, given the constraints of avoiding undue civilian casualties, could only "degrade" Iraq's capacity to deliver chemical and biological weapons but not eliminate them. This was and remains the US dilemma.
But the critics believe that UNSCOM will never be able to do its work effectively because the Iraqis will continue to thwart its mission. President Clinton now says that Iraqi co-operation will be "a test" of Iraq's good faith and implies that, if it fails the test, air strikes will follow, probably without further warning.
So what else is new?