The Blix report will find no "smoking gun" but will say Iraq "can do better" on co-operation, says Deaglán de Bréadún, Foreign Affairs Correspondent.
At 3.30 p.m. this afternoon, Irish time, the quiet-spoken Swede Dr Hans Blix will begin his report to the Security Council on behalf of the UN weapons inspectors.
The Blix team has been searching the highways and byways, factories and palaces of Iraq to see what weapons of mass destruction (WMD) may still be possessed by the dictator President Saddam Hussein.
If advance indications are reliable, Dr Blix will have no gripping tales about stocks of weapons piled high, ready at a word from President Saddam to be unleashed on whatever segment of humanity has most recently incurred his displeasure.
If President Saddam were receiving a school report, we are told that "teacher" Blix would give him a B grade. No "smoking gun" has been found and the regime is co-operating, but not with the enthusiasm that the UN would like. In a training lecture to his inspectors last October, Dr Blix compared their activities to that of a tax or customs inspector. "They are rarely loved but they had better be respected."
His admirers and detractors would have to agree that the bland Swede has been playing a clever game diplomatically. Although he never provides the evidence that the hawks in Washington insist is there, he always manages to sound critical enough to ward off allegations that he is "soft on Saddam" or in Baghdad's pocket.
The next stage in world history, and the lives of thousands, may hang on his words, but the pressure on the 74-year-old lawyer never shows.
Following today's report, Dr Blix will attend private consultations of the council on Wednesday, and that is where the real business may be done.
Meanwhile tomorrow night, in between the two meetings, President Bush will give his state of the union address, where he is expected to issue a rallying-call to the nation and the international community and talk tough to President Saddam.
Although reports on the eve of today's Blix speech must be treated with caution, it is being suggested that he will call on the Iraqis to prove that they have destroyed 3.9 tons of the lethal VX nerve gas, as well as the materials for producing a further 200 tons.
He is also likely to complain about difficulties in questioning Iraqi scientists.
Both Dr Blix and his colleague, Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, have indicated that they want more time to search for evidence of proscribed activities on the part of Iraq.
This will be music to the ears of the French and German governments, who have been publicly unenthusiastic about the threat of war in Iraq. While hardliners in the Bush administration seem to care little about world public opinion, the US public is lukewarm about a war without international support.
Meanwhile, a anti-war demonstration planned for February 15th may be the largest international event of its kind in the history of the planet.
However, a prominent Iraqi exile who visited Dublin at the weekend, Dr Hussain Al-Shahristani, was in little doubt that President Saddam still holds stocks of VX gas.
Dr Al-Shahristani is chairman of the London-based Iraqi Refugee Aid Council, and a professor at the University of Surrey. He holds a Ph.D in nuclear chemistry from the University of Toronto, and was formerly chief scientific adviser to Iraq's Atomic Energy Commission. He fell foul of President Saddam when the dictator sought to redirect the commission's research away from peaceful projects and towards the manufacture of a nuclear bomb.
The professor recalled how he was tortured using "electric high-voltage probes on sensitive parts of the body" for 22 days, and then jailed for almost 12 years, 10 of them in solitary confinement, before making his escape in February 1991.
He said he "keeps very close contact with what's going on inside Iraq". Based on information from his contacts, he warned that the regime could use VX gas and other nerve agents, not against US soldiers wearing masks and protective clothing, but against its own people.
Having incited an uprising among, say, the Muslim Shi'a community, Iraq would use VX against the rebels and then bring the international media from Baghdad to the scene, showing them the terrible casualties and thereby inflaming world public opinion against further conflict.
He said even a litre of VX released on a busy day on a main thoroughfare like Dublin's O'Connell Street would kill many thousands of people. "Saddam has a couple of hundreds of tons of it."
Expressing little surprise that the UN team had apparently found so little, Dr Al-Shahristani said President Saddam was a master of concealment. He was evading the inspectors by moving his chemical and biological weapons from place to place, using a "very long and complex" network of interlinked tunnels beneath the Iraqi capital.
He claimed President Saddam also had "a fairly large stock" of Sarin gas. "I would not know exact quantities. He has produced it in large quantities in the past, and has used it against his own people."
Although he believes the regime has chemical and biological weapons, he does not think it has the capacity to produce nuclear missiles or bombs.
The problem, as he sees it, is not just the existence of current stocks of deadly weapons but the willingness and capacity of President Saddam to manufacture and use further such weapons in the future, often using readily-available raw materials. The real problem was Saddam himself. "So long as he remains in Iraq, he can and will resume the production of weapons of mass destruction."