No one who had bothered to keep up would need further evidence that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, that he seeks still more, that he has lied to the world and defied the UN. That is a matter of public record.

It will not be sufficient "proof" to persuade the French, on the other hand, because no amount of proof could be. Proof was never the issue.

Neither were inspections. And neither, in the end, were Saddam's weapons, or his failure to comply with UN resolutions.

Whatever Saddam had done, whatever the inspectors had found, the French response would be the same: as Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister, told the Security Council two weeks ago, "nothing justifies envisaging military action." Point final. Inspections were always a red herring, a diversion, a delaying tactic.

I suspect that was what Mr. Powell was really out to prove. The case he was making was not so much the perfidy of Saddam as the futility of inspections. As revelation followed revelation of how completely Saddam had eluded the inspectors -- of weapons and documents moved or hidden or disguised; of scientists threatened, or imprisoned, or coached, or even replaced; of, possibly, infiltration of the inspectors themselves -- the weight of the indictment grew.

Every now and then, Mr. Powell would pause to drive the point home: not just that the inspections had not worked, but that they could not work. "Answer me," he demanded, after reminding the Council how thousands of pages of classified documents had been discovered at the home of an Iraqi scientist, "are the inspectors to search the house of every government official, every Baath Party member, and every scientist in the country to find the truth?" "Just imagine trying to find 18 trucks," he said at another point, referring to Iraq's mobile bioweapons factories, "among the thousands of trucks that travel the roads of Iraq every single day." At still another, after describing how Iraq had built the capacity to make chemical weapons into plants that were normally used for civilian purposes, he added, "any inspections of such facilities would be unlikely to turn up anything ... the Iraqis deliberately designed their chemical weapons programs to be inspected." This is a very different picture than that presented by Hans Blix, the head of the UN inspections team, in his own report to the Council. To be sure, Mr. Blix listed about a dozen ways in which Saddam had violated the terms of Resolution 1441, the Security Council's "final" ultimatum to Iraq to disarm. But Mr. Powell must have listed six times as many. The discrepancy is revealing. Either Mr. Blix knew all this, and chose not to share it. Or, more likely, he did not know -- that is, he was unaware of all the many ways in which he had been kept unaware.

Mr. Blix's presentation was meant, in its own way, to show that inspections were working. Yes, Saddam had failed to co-operate fully, but he, Hans Blix, was on to him. All he needed was a little more time.

After Powell, that fiction can no longer be maintained.

Indeed, inspections have never worked. It wasn't inspections that uncovered Saddam's biological weapons in 1995, after four years of looking. It was a defector. It wasn't inspections that revealed the true extent of his nuclear program. Again, it was a defector. It isn't just in the last three months that inspections have proved a farce. It's the last 12 years. It isn't that Saddam has failed to co-operate with the inspectors, but that he has done everything he could to subvert them. It isn't that he has tried to deceive them. It is that he has succeeded. Over and over again.

Yet, incredibly, after 90 minutes of irrefutable testimony to this effect, the immediate remedy proposed by France and others was: more inspections. Our own Foreign Minister, Bill Graham, offered his own twist. It was up to the inspectors, he said, the same cuckolds Saddam had so effortlessly bamboozled, to decide whether inspections should continue, based on their estimation of whether Saddam was being more co-operative, and whether he was likely to be in the future.

This clarifies matters. The choice before the world, it is now evident, is not how to disarm Saddam, but whether to disarm him. Inspections are not a means of achieving disarmament while avoiding war. They are a means of avoiding disarmament.

The anti-war argument, stripped of the fig leaf of inspections, amounts to this: So Saddam has chemical and biological weapons. So he will probably acquire nuclear weapons. So he has made a monkey of the United Nations. Even so, the risks of war are too great. Let him keep his terrible armaments, and let us hope we can contain him.

In the name of "international law," we will stand by while Saddam defies it. In the name of "regional stability," we will allow a dictator with proven territorial ambitions to acquire unstoppable force. In the name of "the suffering people of Iraq," we will leave them in thrall to the world's most brutal despot.

The inspections charade, in short, is over. The real debate can begin.