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In one instance, Powell took the lead in toughening up the presentation. He thought that the International Atomic Energy Agency had been too quick to endorse Iraq's claims that imported aluminum tubes were designed for rockets, not for use in nuclear-processing plants. Powell personally grilled CIA experts on the tubes and was told that U.S. intelligence had spun some of the intercepted tubes at the extreme speeds required to enrich uranium. Rocket tubes would have shattered--these withstood the strain. The discussion of the tubes was a high point in a performance that took almost 1 1/2 hours. When it was over, Powell had done about as much as any member of the Administration could to convince the world that Saddam was cheating the inspectors, hiding weapons of mass destruction, maneuvering to acquire nuclear weapons and in league with terrorists from al-Qaeda.
The difficulty is this: lots of people already knew that or at least suspected it. The issue is what to do now and how to make the case for war. As a senior diplomat at the U.N. said, "The Security Council is not arguing about whether Iraq is cooperating with the inspectors. Everyone but the Syrians acknowledges that it is not. The question is, Should we go to war?" Neither the Security Council nor the American public have answered that question unambiguously in the affirmative.
But public opinion is coming around. At coffee shops and water coolers, Powell's performance won high marks. To be sure, there are plenty of Americans like Vicki Pollyea, an Air Force colonel's daughter in Tampa, Fla., who feel "we're jumping into something extremely dangerous without world support, and it has a real feeling of Vietnam." But in the TIME/CNN poll, 17% said Powell had changed their mind. Before his speech, they opposed sending troops to Iraq; now they favored it. "It scared me," said Abby Headrick, 20, a University of Georgia junior, of the speech. "I had no idea Saddam had so much access to materials to make nuclear weapons."
After Powell's presentation, fewer Americans made their support for war conditional on U.N. backing. In the TIME/CNN poll, 36% said they would be prepared to send troops to Iraq even if the U.N. opposed it, up from 27% in mid-January. But even so, the Administration is acutely conscious that most Americans polled prefer that any war have the U.N.'s backing.
Will that be forthcoming? Immediately after Powell spoke, the world was treated to the less than edifying spectacle of Council members reading out potted set pieces stressing the need to give the inspectors more time--"Idiots sitting there with these prepackaged statements," as one of Powell's aides frustratedly put it. But the public responses mattered not at all compared with what was said privately. Powell had hardly uttered his last sentence when behind-the-scenes U.S. lobbying of Security Council members commenced.