Over the next few days, the United States will dissect the deal, Iraq will crow that all it needed was an impartial intermediary, the United Nations will bask in the afterglow of successful diplomacy. Three faces saved — not a bad weekend’s work for Secretary General Kofi Annan.

Over the next few months, unless Saddam Hussein recently got a good whacking with the honesty stick, the deal will fall apart, Iraq will fudge. Nothing will be found at the eight presidential palaces except tennis courts and hot tubs; all the nasty stuff will have been long buried elsewhere. U.S. forces will go back on red alert. The U.N. will go back to hand-wringing.

Sad to say, that’s about the best that could be hoped for. Mr. Annan has not brought peace, but he has bought time. Time for Iraq to prove it cannot be trusted. Time for the United States to prove its Middle East policy is not driven by a sex scandal. Time for the U.N. to prove it is willing to give renegade members a fair hearing, but not carte blanche to trash Security Council resolutions.

Unless there are hidden devils in the secretary general’s details leading to outright rejection by the United States, the agreement probably does little more than delay air strikes until such time as Iraq demonstrates its unfettered aversion to unfettered inspections. The smart money gives it about 60 days.

That’s long enough for several good things to happen. Iraq’s Arab neighbors can recalculate the striking range of a Scud loaded with nerve gas or biological agents; they can reflect upon what Iraq already has done to Iran, Kuwait and his own people; they can realize that marching in pro-Saddam parades probably is not in their best interest. The United States, along with Britain, can spread the word that it was the threat of imminent military action that made Saddam blink. U.N. apologists, especially the light-heavyweights France and Russia, can extricate themselves from the untenable position of seeming to favor lucrative oil deals over the security of an entire region and the integrity of the United Nations. The entire world in general, and the Middle East in particular, can weigh the relative merits of diplomacy and warfare.

Best of all, several thousand innocent Iraqis at ground zero can breathe a collective sigh of relief, even if the reprieve is only for a fortnight or two. Kofi Annan saved a lot of faces the last few days — now it’s up to the beneficiaries to see if they can save some lives.