In a rare, and uncommonly orchestrated, televised interview on Tuesday, Saddam Hussein said the proof that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction is that United Nations inspectors have been unable to find any. The United States is instigating war because it wants to control the world’s oil supply and, thus, the world. If Iraq supported al-Qaida, which it does not, Iraq would be proud of it. Jews are behind it all, he said.

If Saddam Hussein were not a brutal dictator, he would make a world-class conspiracy nut.

In his appearance before the U.N. Security Council Wednesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell eschewed the coy word games, the tiresome and empty assertions, the ethnic hatred. Instead, he offered hard evidence: audio tapes of Iraqi military officers conspiring to hide U.N.-banned biological and chemical materials in advance of the U.N. inspectors; satellite photographs of weapons and missile facilities being hurriedly disassembled; first-person accounts of the chicanery – including death threats – employed to keep the inspectors from interviewing key scientists and technicians; documents and testimony describing Iraq’s methodical progress toward nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Evidence of Iraq’s support of, and the haven it provides to, al-Qaida and associated terrorist groups was in the nature of circumstantial, but that is the nature of terrorism and it still was comprehensive and powerful.

If Mr. Powell were not a secretary of state, he would make a world-class prosecuting attorney.

Some, in this country and around the world, may view these conflicting presentations as just another one of those “he said, she said” situations – whom to believe? Most, it is hoped, can distinguish between empty claims and hard evidence, and most, it is also hoped, consider the source in evaluating conflicting presentations. If character counts at all, it counts here.

What matters most is whether the United Nations, the Security Council in particular, can make this distinction. There has never been any question that Iraq has persistently and willfully violated Resolution 1411, the council’s unanimous “one last chance” demand of last November to disarm, not to mention, since the Gulf War, the 16 disarmament resolutions before that. Failure to make that distinction, failure to expect compliance with U.N. resolutions, failure to take decisive action when there is no compliance will, as Mr. Powell said, “place the United Nations in danger of irrelevance.”

The consensus of Security Council members immediately after Mr. Powell’s presentation was that Iraq surely has defied the U.N. and that an additional round of inspections must result in compliance. Further inspections and compliance are vastly preferable to war; the question for the Security Council is what it can do to ensure that one more “last chance” will do what the current one has not. Citing the collapse of the post-World War I League of Nations from failure to “create actions from its words” and the rise of tyranny that followed, British Foreign Minister Jack Straw properly noted that this “is a moment of choice for Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime; it is also a moment of choice for the United Nations.”