Washington pledges last push to avoid Iraq war

Washington pledged one last diplomatic push to avoid war with Iraq yesterday while Baghdad challenged US President George W. Bush to back his charge of a link with al Qaeda.

Following Bush's State of the Union address outlining the case for military action, the White House said the standoff with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was entering a "final phase".

"The president still believes that if diplomacy results in strong and powerful expressions of unity toward Saddam Hussein so that Saddam Hussein sees as powerful message as possible that he needs to disarm, then this can be resolved peacefully," spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters travelling with Bush.

But he said Bush was determined to muster a military coalition to disarm Saddam by force if he did not respond.

The United States might consider a new UN mandate before attacking Iraq if needed, but President Saddam Hussein will be disarmed peacefully or by force, Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday.

"Quite clearly a second resolution is an idea that's on the table and there's a strong school of thought supporting the idea," he told Britain's Channel 4 News.

Bush earlier told Congress Saddam had shown "utter contempt" for the United Nations and pledged an all-out assault if necessary in an address designed to try to extend international and domestic support for a war.

Key allies welcomed the intelligence offer but urged Bush not to attack without backing from the United Nations Security Council, most of whose members have yet to be convinced of any link with Osama bin Laden's network or need for military action.

While many countries sought more time for the search for a peaceful way out of the crisis, Germany, a leading opponent of any use of force, said it feared diplomacy might not avert war.

"I am worried whether we will succeed in avoiding a war in Iraq," Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder told a conference.

Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz told ABC news he "absolutely" denied any link with al Qaeda. "And I challenge Bush and his government to present any, any evidence of that."

Iraqi lawmakers also denounced Bush's address. "There is nothing new in Bush's speech. The new thing is that he reiterates old lies," Abdul Aziz al-Jebouri, a prominent legislator, told Reuters at the parliament in Baghdad.

Bush said the United States would ask the UN Security Council to convene next week to hear fresh intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links with the al Qaeda network behind the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

"The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving," Bush told Congress late on Tuesday, citing UN reports of chemical and biological agents and nuclear weapon components he said Saddam had not accounted for.

Washington says it would prefer the Security Council to back military action against Saddam but that there are ample legal grounds for it to go ahead alone if its allies remain reluctant to explicitly sanction force.

The US military said it had activated almost 16,000 more reserve troops, swelling the total to almost 95,000, the biggest since the 1991 Gulf War over Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

The council met behind closed doors to discuss this week's report by weapons inspectors on what they had found in 60 days of scouring Iraq for banned arms and the obstacles they had encountered along the way.

Russia, one of five countries with veto powers on the 15-member Security Council, said yesterday it saw no grounds for the use of force, after earlier signalling it might be prepared to adopt a tougher line against Saddam.

And diplomats in Brussels said the Nato defence alliance remained divided over whether to start planning indirect military support for a possible US-led war, with some countries still worried about the timing.

"They feel we are at a sensitive stage of the UN process and a Nato decision would appear to be support for military action, and could somehow undermine the UN process," one diplomat told Reuters.