By Merle D. Kellerhals, Jr.
Washington File staff writer

Washington -- Secretary of State Colin Powell told a congressional committee February 12 that the impasse over Iraq has reached a decisive moment.

Powell told the House International Relations Committee the world is reaching a moment of truth as to whether the disarmament of Iraq will resolve itself peacefully or be resolved by military force.

"The president still hopes it can be resolved peacefully," Powell said. "I think everybody has that hope. I have that hope. I don't like war, I've been in war, I've sent men [into] war, I've seen friends die in war. But sometimes it is necessary when you need it to maintain international order."

The United States is prepared to lead an international coalition under U.N. auspices or, if the U.N. will not act -- and "demonstrates its irrelevance," then the United States will lead a large coalition of the willing, Powell said.

The House committee was conducting its annual hearing with the secretary on the State Department's fiscal year 2004 budget proposal. Powell gave brief remarks about the budget plan, but he then broke with past practice and immediately launched into a discussion of the global debate over how best to disarm Iraq.

The issue with Iraq is not whether there should be more weapons inspectors as the French, Germans and Belgians have argued, he said. It is about compliance with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441 and the 16 other U.N. resolutions that came before it.

"The United States will not be deterred. Iraq must be disarmed -- peacefully or through the use of military force," he said.

Powell said he would ask France and Germany February 14 at the United Nations why they want more weapons inspections and how much more time is necessary, or "are you just delaying for the sake of delaying in order to get Saddam Hussein off the hook and no disarmament." On February 14 Hans Blix, chief of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, are scheduled to give the U.N. Security Council an updated report on how cooperative Iraq has been with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Powell said he still believes it is possible to rally the international community to discharge its obligations.

"All of the nations that we are now having debates with are, at the end of the day, allies and friends of ours," he said. "We've had our differences. We've had our fights in the past, and we've always managed to find a way forward. And it's my job as secretary of state to work with these nations and find a way forward, but never by compromising our principles and our strong beliefs, but by using the power of principles to convince others of what we should do in a collective fashion."

House International Relations Committee Chairman Henry Hyde, an Illinois Republican, said at the outset of the hearing that the committee was meeting at a time of great peril and great opportunity, and the relevance of the United Nations and international political order are at stake.

"The peril is obvious: aggressive regimes -- armed with weapons of mass destruction, uncontrolled by any domestic political constraints, and linked to international terrorist networks in a shadow world of malice where the murder of innocents is considered a noble vocation. These threaten the very possibility of order in world affairs," Hyde said. "In Iraq, the world's 58-year experiment with collective security is being put to the supreme test. If Iraq is permitted to defy 12 years of United Nations resolutions demanding its disarmament, then that 58-year experiment in collective security will be, for all intents and purposes, over."

Hyde said he hoped that Iraqi disarmament could be enforced with the united support of the U.N. Security Council, but whatever the case, it is imperative that the United States makes certain that effective and decisive enforcement takes place.

"This peril also contains, in my view, a great opportunity. The opportunity is to recast the politics of a turbulent region of the world, so that opportunities for real stability are created. What we often call 'stability' in the Middle East has been, for the past half-century, the most volatile instability. The world cannot live with this instability much longer," Hyde said.

Representative Tom Lantos of California, the committee's ranking Democrat, said that he was "particularly disgusted by the blind intransigence and utter ingratitude" of France, Germany and Belgium, who have blocked a U.S. plan in NATO to provide additional security for Turkey against an attack from Iraq.

Powell assured the committee that Turkey will be defended. "We have already determined how to do that," he said. "It would be much better if NATO would act as an alliance on that and not allow itself to be tied up in knots by three of the 19 nations."