A masterly display by a trusted American

Arguments will persist over the deeper merits of war with Iraq. But only the wilfully blind will maintain after Colin Powell's presentation yesterday that Baghdad is sincerely co-operating with the United Nations weapons inspectors to disarm, as demanded by Security Council resolution 1441.

Until a couple of weeks ago, the Secretary of State had been the last hope of the anti-war camp, the one element of restraint in a Bush administration bent on war. Instead, his 80-minute statement to the Council completed his conversion to the cause.

In calm but unrelenting style, General Powell may have slammed the door on peace. This was not simply good soldier Powell, whose heart was not in the commander-in-chief's instructions he was following. This was the administration's most authoritative spokesman, the man whom, according to a poll yesterday, 63 per cent of Americans most trust on policy towards Iraq. And this was a man whose patience has been exhausted.

The sections in General Powell's address dealing with Iraq's nuclear ambition and the regime's ties with al-Qa'ida were less than watertight. But with George Tenet, the director of the CIA, sitting impassively behind him, General Powell wove together clues from every part of the huge American intelligence realm to create a tapestry portraying Iraq, for all its professions of good faith, as a systematic, deliberate deceiver over its chemical and biological programmes.

How times have changed. "This is mere evidence," sniffed Charles de Gaulle when Dean Acheson, President John Kennedy's special envoy, went to the Elysée Palace 40 years ago and offered to show him photographs of the Soviet missiles in Cuba.

"Great nations," De Gaulle observed, "do not need to rely on evidence."

Acheson was the Powell of his day. These days, however, for much of the world, the US is not so much a great nation as a rogue nation. Trust is low on the list of qualities it inspires. This time, General Powell had to provide evidence, not denunciations.

True, there was no "smoking gun" or "Stevenson moment" (when Adlai Stevenson brandished the Cuba photos at the UN, showing incontrovertibly that Cuba had stockpiles of Soviet missiles).

But as Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former Middle East specialist of the CIA, now with the American Enterprise Institute think-tank here, put it: "Unless you're totally against war, the case is overwhelming."

Of course, those totally against war will still maintain ­ as Baghdad did within minutes of the speech ­ that the photos and the intercepts and the claims of the defectors were simple fakes, lies put about by Washington war-mongers; "a typical American stunt", as one Iraqi official put it.

But these were not muttered, unsourceable allegations by those all-too-familiar "senior US officials". This was America's top diplomat. On the record, putting his reputation on the line ­ and ready to blow precious intelligence sources in his bid to win the sceptics over.

But has he won them over? Whatever the formidable PR skills of General Powell, some will take a good deal more convincing. The easiest audience (though the most important for the President if war is indeed inevitable) is the US public. Stoked by George Bush's State of the Union speech last week, support for military action was rising here even before the Secretary of State gave his presentation.

Joe Biden, the senior Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who has frequently complained the administration had failed to make the case for war, surely summed up the reaction of a vast majority of Americans: "If I had this evidence before an unbiased jury, I'd get a conviction."

Indeed, within the first 20 minutes, General Powell had demonstrated beyond most reasonable doubt that Iraq was playing hide-and-seek with the inspectors, in defiance of resolution 1441. Whether foreign audiences are persuaded, whether it makes the much desired second UN resolution more likely, is a different matter.

But it will be far, far harder to hide behind the fiction that inspections, even longer and stepped-up inspections, will do the trick, barring an extraordinary change of heart by Saddam Hussein.

After yesterday no one could pretend that the hawks had muscled General Powell from the centre of US policy-making.

The apocalyptic, curled-lip pronouncements of Dick Cheney, the jibes of Donald Rumsfeld about the "old Europe," pale into insignificance beside the Secretary of State's performance yesterday.

Opponents of war should have been careful what they wished for. They wanted General Powell squarely at the helm of US policy: they've got it.

But in a sense, the Powell tour de force, billed as the most important moment for the Security Council since 1962, was beside the point. Hans Blix's report of 27 January left scant doubt that Iraq was technically in breach of resolution 1441. General Powell surely sealed the legal case.

But the real issues are the ones the Security Council ducked for a few months when it agreed resolution 1441 last November. Those months have now all but expired. The issues are starker than ever. First, is Iraq a threat so immediate that it must be tackled by force now, at the risk of further destabilisation of the region?

And second, even given the changed rules of the terrorist era, do democracies have the moral right to launch an unprovoked war?

But in Washington at least, even these questions are increasingly moot. Yes, there could be an assassin's bullet, a one-way ticket into exile or ­ least likely of all ­ President Saddam's conversion to the cause of peace and international brotherhood. But in the words of one seasoned observer here, "the odds of war are 95 per cent".