AMERICA/Conor O'Clery: When Colin Powell leafed through his newspapers on Thursday morning he would have got particular pleasure from the headline on Mary McGrory's column in the Washington Post. It read: "I'm persuaded". It takes a lot to persuade McGrory, whose liberal commentaries date back to the Kennedy era, that war might be the only way.
One of her recent articles sympathetically hailed peace marchers in the capital as a "pre-emptive demonstration against the pre-emptive war". She thought George Bush was picking a fight for the wrong reasons - big oil, the far right - against the wrong enemy. Nobody she knew in her circle in Washington was for this war. Wednesday changed that.
The conversion of such a prominent doubter to the war camp is a testament to Powell's strong performance at the UN on Wednesday in laying out the case against Iraq, but even more so to his perceived integrity. The US Secretary of State is no Robert McNamara, who, as Jimmy Breslin of Newsday (definitely not persuaded) reminded us in his column, reported false information to President Lyndon Johnson about a North Vietnamese attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, which was then used to justify bombing North Vietnam. Nor is Powell a Henry Kissinger, Nixon's slippery accomplice in the conspiracy to secretly bomb Cambodia.
He is easily the nation's most trusted politician. A Gallup poll on the eve of Powell's speech to the UN showed that Americans by a wide margin - 63 per cent to 24 per cent - choose Powell over Bush as the leader they trust more on Iraq. The "democratic imperialists" in the Bush administration like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle make a lot of Americans uneasy. Powell is different. Or was. He was the dove among the hawks, in whom the anti-war camp placed its hopes. Some feel they were misguided in thinking he sought to muffle the war drums, and that Powell's advice to the President to go through the UN was, all along, simply that it was a better way. But most of the nation, and Mary McGrory, saw a reluctant warrior weighing the evidence and concluding "Enough!". The messenger authenticated the message. In an NBC poll taken after his speech, 66 per cent of viewers said they found his case convincing and 60 per cent said America should go to war to remove Saddam Hussein.
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Conservative columnists who have been behind Bush all along were exhilarated by Powell's domestic triumph. Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic called for "Three cheers for Mary McGrory, she goes where others aren't so honest to tread." Many poured scorn on the United Nations. The UN "is on the verge of demonstrating finally and fatally its moral bankruptcy and its strategic irrelevance," wrote Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post.
The UN "is being used as a shield to protect a lawless nation", declared Tony Blankley of the Washington Times. But the real bile was reserved for the French, the "Cheese-eating surrender monkeys" as the National Review Online called them in a phrase picked up from the Simpsons and gleefully reproduced in several publications. Andrew Sullivan published a spoof e-mail about Jacques Chirac sending his elite L'Abandonnement du Field d'Honneur Battalion to help the Iraqis. Sullivan said that condescension for the French had "turned into contempt"; Blakeley called the French "contemptuous"; Dick Morris in the New York Post said France was "pro-Saddam"; George Will described French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin as "oleaginous" (unctuous and oily) and Fox TV host Cal Thomas said Powell made so strong a case that "only the duped, the dumb and the desperate" like de Villepin could ignore it.
They were all outdone in French-bashing by Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair, who was given the run of the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal on Thursday to categorise Chirac as "a positive monster of conceit . . . a vain and posturing and venal man . . . the rat that tried to roar." Ingratitude from a Vichy France that had to be rescued from Nazism was a common theme in letters from readers, one of whom in the Wall Street Journal, wrote simply, "God Bless France! She's always there when she needs us." Security Council members are faced with the prospect that if they obstruct the drive for UN approval for war, they will suffer the wrath of the only super-power - and definitely its conservative columnists. France has already failed the loyalty test. If it uses its veto, France will get the blame for hollowing out the Security Council, rather than the US, which is going to war, no matter what.
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More about a war waged by Washington on another front, mentioned in an earlier column.
Last week federal prosecutors secured the conviction in San Francisco of Ed Rosenthal for growing marijuana. Rosenthal cultivated pot as an Oakland city official under a 1966 voter-approved state law which makes it legal in California for medical purposes. The judge refused to allow this to be mentioned at the trial, as it is not a valid defence against federal drug charges. Rosenthal was portrayed in court as an ordinary drug dealer. He now faces a lengthy prison term.
The jury members were furious when they found out after passing their guilty verdict. "I hope he appeals and wins," said foreman Charles Sackett. Seven other US states allow the sick and dying to smoke or grow marijuana with a doctor's recommendation, and the idea was supported by 80 per cent of Americans in a recent poll. They are on notice to quit from an administration supposedly committed to giving states more rights. Attorney General John Ashcroft also intervened in the legal process in New York state. He directed federal prosecutors there to seek the death penalty in 10 cases in which a lesser sentence was sought. His move comes as popular support for executions is declining, due to the number of cases where DNA evidence has cleared inmates.
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War is looming. Security around the president has got tighter. Yet a religious fundamentalist was able to walk through a Secret Service cordon and get to George Bush at a prayer breakfast.
Fortunately the Rev Richard Weaver only wanted to give Bush a message from God. It warned, "If America does not repent, there will be 50,000 casualties and a six-month war" with Iraq. His tactic for getting past security was ingenious - he just walked in, with short hair and dark blue suit, which made him an invisible man in that company.