At about 2 p.m. on Tuesday, as the leading UN arms inspector, Mr Richard Butler, laboured over his report on Iraq, the White House Chief-of-Staff, Mr John Podesta, was informing congressional leaders that US forces would launch an attack on Iraq the following day.
Almost four more hours would pass before Mr Butler finished drafting his findings and took the first copy to the UN headquarters in New York for the Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan. Yet aboard Air Force One, en route from the Middle East, President Clinton had already ordered the bombardment of Iraq that would be dubbed Operation Desert Fox.
Because Mr Butler's report is described as the trigger for the US and British air campaign, underway since Wednesday night, that juxtaposition has brought a fierce attack on the chief of the UN Special Commission.
The Russian ambassador to the UN, Mr Sergey Lavrov, backed by China and some of Mr Annan's senior advisers, has levelled accusations that Mr Butler drafted his conclusions to serve Washington's war aims.
The Australian diplomat, an expert on arms control who has served as his country's delegate to the UN, answered those charges on Thursday: "I want to say it as simply and as plainly as I can," he said in New York. "That report was based on the experts of Unscom. It danced to no one's tune. It was not written for anyone's purposes, including, as some of you have suggested, for the purposes of the United States."
Mr Butler said "the simple conclusion that Iraq did not keep its promise of full co-operation" was "honest, factual and objective". Among the circumstances cited by those who suspect Mr Butler of co-ordinating with Washington on a rationale for war, three stand out:
Mr Butler made four visits to the US mission to the UN on Monday, the day before finishing his report.
Administration officials acknowledge they had advance knowledge of the language he would use and sought to influence it, as one official said, "at the margins".
Mr Butler ordered his inspectors to evacuate Baghdad, in anticipation of a military attack, on Tuesday night at a time when most members of the Security Council had yet to receive his report.
Mr Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for Unscom, said those who "accuse him of being rosy then and gloomy now" overlook "the catalogue of problems that built up over the period".
Clinton administration officials said any US interactions with Mr Butler should not distract from the central facts of Iraqi efforts to thwart Unscom's work.
One senior administration official, acknowledging that US interaction with Mr Butler is a natural subject of interest because "Butler is the trigger" for war, insisted that Washington did nothing to toughen Unscom's conclusions.
Even had Mr Butler not briefed the US ambassador, Mr Peter Burleigh, and others, Washington would have had good reason to anticipate negative conclusions. His nearly fruitless exchange of letters with Iraq's Deputy Foreign Minister, Mr Riyadh al-Qaysi, and a series of conflicts in Baghdad over access to inspection sites were well known.
Administration officials said they thus felt comfortable concluding well in advance that Iraq would fall far short of Mr Clinton's demands on November 15th for unrestricted co-operation with Mr Butler.
The swiftness of the move from conclusion to bombing was dictated, according to administration officials, by the wish to catch Iraq off guard and prevent any diplomatic impediment to the attack.
"It was the strong recommendation of the [Pentagon's] Joint Staff that once he made this decision, it should be implemented very quickly in order to catch the Iraqis undispersed, and before they could put their SAM [surface-to-air missile] traps up," said one official involved in the political-military planning.
Based on frustrating experience twice in the past year, the administration also wanted to forestall any third-party intervention such as those made earlier by the UN Secretary-General, Russia and France.
"They acted so quickly that there wasn't time for him to get involved, even if he wanted to," said a close ally of Mr Annan.