Conor O'Clery: Colin Powell was reportedly furious over being "sandbagged" by Dominique de Villepin on Monday when the French Foreign Minister said at the UN that war was a "dead end" and "nothing justifies envisaging military action". One aide to the US Secretary of State was quoted as saying the French behaviour "made war more likely, not less likely. Saddam sits out there and says, 'Oh, the council is divided again. Excellent'".
Mr Powell has turned notably hawkish on Iraq, and the public spat with France has helped close ranks in the White House behind Bush. Two weeks ago Mr Powell said that "the inspectors are really now starting to gain momentum", but this week he said bluntly: "Inspections will not work." Donald Rumsfeld's dismissal of the two European powers as "old Europe" reflects the mood in the Oval Office where there are said to be fulminations about European ingratitude.
The White House spokesman, Mr Ari Fleischer, lectured reporters yesterday about how Europe wanted sanctions to work against Iraq in 1991, but if they had their way, Saddam Hussein would be still in Kuwait. He also recalled "massive protests" in Europe when the US "counter-deployed" Pershing missiles against Soviet missiles in the 1980s, but this had created a balance of power and helped "make the world a better place".
Clearly European anti-war urgings and protests are cutting no ice in the White House. And the "so-called" inspectors, as Mr Bush called the UN weapons inspectors, will soon be going home.
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NEVERTHELESS, there is a rise in anti-war sentiment in the US, which President Bush has to take seriously and will address in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday. An NBC poll shows 63 per cent against going to war without UN support, up from 55 per cent in December. The administration is losing the argument.
Some of this may have to do with credibility. One of the most important charges the White House made against Saddam Hussein to get Congress and public support for military action last autumn concerned Iraq's alleged nuclear weapons programme. In his UN address on September 12th, the President accused Iraq of making "several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon".
In subsequent days national security adviser, Ms Condoleezza Rice, said the tubes "are only really suited for nuclear weapons programmes, centrifuge programmes". And Mr Powell declared they knew "Iraq has tried to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes, which can be used to enrich uranium in centrifuges for a nuclear weapons programme".
Mr Bush repeated the charge in an address to the nation on October 8th. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) naturally made it a priority for its inspectors when they returned to Iraq. They went through files and interviewed suppliers.
Yesterday the Washington Post reported their conclusion that Iraq had, indeed, been running a secret procurement operation to get high-strength aluminum tubes, but not to make nuclear bombs. Rather, it was to replace Iraq's aging arsenal of conventional 81mm rockets for multiple-rocket launchers. It also turns out that US intelligence officials had voiced these suspicions all along, prompting "rancorous debate" in the White House.
Somehow the tubes don't get mentioned any more in the US case against Saddam, though Mr Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defence Secretary, accused Baghdad on Thursday of failing to mention its "efforts to procure uranium from abroad".
He gave no evidence for this claim. David Albright, a former IAEA weapons expert, said: "In this case, I fear that the information was put out there for a short-term political goal: to convince people that Saddam Hussein is close to acquiring nuclear weapons."
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CREDIBILITY is also dogging Mr Bush as he travels the country to promote the stimulus package he announced on January 7th. This eliminated tax on stock dividends at a cost of $364 billion over 10 years. He said he did this "for the good of our senior citizens and to support capital formation across the land".
Democratic Sen Tom Daschle, Senate minority leader, called it, however, the "Leave No Millionaire Behind Act" and it seems the Democratic message that Bush favours the wealthy is having an impact.
The Tax Policy Centre of the Brookings Institution has calculated that 45.8 per cent of the benefits from eliminating the dividend tax will go to the top 1 per cent of earners, households making more than $316,000 a year, and 70 per cent to the top 5 per cent - those with more than $133,000 a year.
Public scepticism is reflected in an ABC poll showing that 61 per cent of Americans now believe Mr Bush's economic plan mostly benefits the rich. The teflon that has clung to the President since September 11th is peeling off. An NBC survey found that only 44 per cent back the President's economic approach, down 19 points from last year.
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THIS week the White House was caught in a deliberate, premeditated, brazen cover-up. All can be revealed. It happened on Wednesday when Mr Bush went to St Louis to defend his dividend tax-cut and dismiss criticism of it as "typical class-war rhetoric".
He spoke in a warehouse against a backdrop of imitation cardboard boxes stamped "Made in America". Stacked in front of his lectern were nine real cardboard boxes, forming a tableau to show he was right there on the American shop floor. The boxes were marked "Build-a-Bear" and contained teddy-bear construction kits. But there was something strange about them. Each had a length of wide brown tape stuck across the bottom.
After Mr Bush stepped down, reporters peeled back the tapes to find the words "Made in China" stamped on each box. The cover-up had been ordered by White House volunteers. The incident was called "Boxgate".