Is war now inevitable?

Whatever it revealed about Iraq, Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation to the UN Security Council on Wednesday said something equally as important about the Bush administration: It is completely committed to war.

The major question still open, to the White House, is who will stand with the US when the time comes for action against Saddam Hussein. Mr. Powell's implicit message to the other diplomats in the Council chambers was that the train is ready to leave the station and it's time to get on board. Thus the US looks unfavorably on calls for a redoubled weapons inspections effort. The course of diplomacy with Iraq likely has only weeks to run.

"The US will act with the allies it has," says Robert Pfaltzgraff, a security expert at Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in Medford, Mass. "There is no way you could make that kind of compelling case with that detailed information ... without the intention of moving very soon to military intervention."

That the administration has long been serious about combat in Iraq is of course obvious from its actions. It has already spent tens of millions of dollars to assemble a formidable striking force in the Gulf region.

Furthermore, there is still a chance that such action won't be necessary. Mr. Hussein might flee for a posh exile in some distant part of the world. He could be deposed, or perhaps undergo the complete transformation that US policy would require of him, and offer up all evidence of his secret weapons programs for inspectors to see.

But pigs haven't been spotted flying in either Baghdad or Washington, and at this point a clash of arms seems the most probably outcome of the current crisis. Secretary Powell has long been thought to be the senior administration official most opposed to war, and to see him flip through the evidence of Iraq's malfeasance in his typically forceful manner was to see all hope of a softer administration policy start to fade away.

"There is no doubt they are prepared to go to war," says John Reppert, a retired Army brigadier general and expert on strategy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.

IT'S unlikely that the administration expected its opponents in the Security Council to just throw up their arms and admit the error of their ways in the wake of Powell's presentation. Nor did that happen - the initial reaction of France, Germany, and other proponents of continued diplomacy was that Powell's speech showed the need to redouble the inspections effort, not abandon it entirely.

But from the US point of view, Powell showed that inspections don't work. The Bush administration and much of Europe seem to have different frameworks through which they view the inspections effort. To France, Germany, and other administration critics, they are detectives who now need more resources. The US believes such an active effort is doomed to failure, and that the inspectors should more properly be recipients of information the Iraqi government has decided to provide the world.

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