Powell Receives High Marks for His Presentation

Historians, analysts, pollsters and members of Congress gave Secretary of State Colin L. Powell rave reviews for his performance in a difficult role at the U.N. Security Council, even as some wondered how many minds would be changed by the evidence he presented.

“His performance was of presidential magnitude,” said Alton Frye, a longtime Washington watcher at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“There was no one smoking gun, but by the end of the speech, there were shell casings everywhere,” said Matthew Spalding, a political historian at the Heritage Foundation in Washington.

A Gallup Poll conducted and released before Wednesday’s speech found that Americans trust Powell more than they do President Bush to make the right decision on Iraq.

Whereas Bush’s State of the Union address boosted overall support for an invasion from 52% to 58%, and 53% of those surveyed said the president had made a convincing case for war, 60% said Powell’s case to the U.N. would be “very important” to their opinion about a war.

And 63% said they trusted Powell more than Bush on policy toward Iraq.

Liberals and moderate Republicans have respected Powell from the start of the Bush administration, viewing the former general as the leading advocate of multilateralism and a counterweight to other officials who are criticized as too quick to resort to military force.

The secretary of State’s cool, collegial style plays better in the diplomatic world than does Bush’s Texas bluster -- and the Bush camp knows it, analysts said. Bush made a canny political decision, they said, in deploying Powell -- a man with enough personal gravitas to appeal to the allies and a track record of reluctance to use force -- to make a forceful case to the Security Council that Iraq is perpetrating a grand deception.

“It didn’t come across as a heavy-handed speech, which was a good move on Powell’s part,” Spalding said. “These are not the cowboy Americans who have set the Security Council up for a ‘gotcha’ moment. This was very reasonable, and his argument built up over time.... He didn’t throw it on the table.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) praised Powell as one of the “most credible” and “most respected” men in America.

“It was statesmanship of a very high order in a tremendously difficult assignment,” Frye said. “His colleagues on the Security Council don’t want to believe this -- [and] they are not yet committed to an action path other than strengthening the inspection regime.”

Powell acknowledged that the evidence is not always conclusive, yet he built up the circumstantial evidence, as well as intelligence intercepts that are more than circumstantial, into “a powerful, systematic case,” Frye said.

Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller said Powell’s presentation would be especially effective in persuading those who feel the United States must prove that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is manipulating the world, but less so for those who wonder why the U.S. believes he poses an immediate threat.

Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution said Powell’s presentation was masterful, but he questioned how many Americans outside the political elite watched a piece of “insider baseball.”

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Times staff writers Nick Anderson and Doyle McManus contributed to this report.