Bush demands UN action against Iraq

President George W. Bush yesterday issued a ringing challenge to the United Nations on Iraq, saying if the world body did not force President Saddam Hussein to disarm and stop backing terrorism then "action will be unavoidable".

But UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, speaking minutes before Bush, said only the United Nations could authorise military force in cases that go beyond straightforward self-defence and that multilateral action was essential.

"The Security Council resolutions will be enforced - the just demands of peace and security will be met - or action will be unavoidable," Bush declared. "And a regime that has lost its legitimacy will also lose its power."

But foreign states welcomed Bush's commitment to pursue diplomatic pressure at this stage, including backing a new UN resolution. US allies and other world leaders, as well as many members of the US Congress, have counselled this course.

Bush issued a fierce indictment of Saddam, saying he posed a "grave and gathering danger" after engaging in a "decade of defiance" of post-Gulf War UN demands by developing weapons of mass destruction.

Iraqi Ambassador Mohammed Aldouri, who was in the UN General Assembly hall when Bush spoke, said the United States had repeatedly failed to find any evidence that Iraq was involved in terrorism.

Instead Bush delivered the "longest series of fabrications that has ever been told by a leader of a nation," Aldouri told reporters. "I only can say that President Bush's speech had no credibility at all."

Bush's speech coincided with an increased beat of US war drums, including the disclosure that a major part of the US military command overseeing operations in the Middle East would, at least temporarily, be moved from the United States to the Gulf.

The United States is demanding a return of unrestricted UN inspections of Iraq's suspected weapons programmes, which Saddam agreed to after his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War but which were abandoned in 1998 after hindrance by Iraq.

While he joined Bush in demanding Iraq comply with all resolutions, Annan questioned Bush's right to go to war.

Any state, if attacked, retained the right of self-defense, he said. "But beyond that, when States decide to use force, to deal with broader threats to international peace and security, there is no substitute for the unique legitimacy provided by the United Nations," he added.

Insisting that Iraq's refusal to abide by previous resolutions threatened the authority of the United Nations, Bush said the United States would work with other members of the UN Security Council on a new resolution.

"What was positive in his speech is that future action is rooted in the United Nations," Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik told reporters.

Britain's UN ambassador, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, asked if he expected the Security Council to give Iraq a deadline, said: "I think the role of the inspection team in completing the disarmament is vital and the Security Council will meet to discuss how that can be enacted."

Bush has increasingly equated his commitment to oust Saddam with the US-led war on terrorism, started after the September 11 attacks last year blamed on Islamic militant Osama bin Laden's Afghanistan-based al Qaeda network.

"Al Qaeda terrorists, escaped from Afghanistan, are known to be in Iraq," Bush said, a comment that brought a dismissive smile from an Iraqi diplomat in the packed United Nations General Assembly to listen to the speech.

Most US allies and other world states, while backing the campaign against international terrorism, have been wary of any military attack on Baghdad, and many, particularly Arab states, have openly opposed it.

Bush, implicitly rejecting arguments from critics in Washington and abroad that Saddam posed no immediate danger, insisted that taking no action on Iraq was not an option.

"We cannot stand by and do nothing while dangers gather," he said. "To assume this regime's good faith is to bet the lives of millions and the peace of the world in a reckless gamble and this is a risk we must not take."

The White House released a 22-page document listing 16 UN Security Council resolutions it said Saddam had violated, including demands he destroy, and stop making, weapons of mass destruction.

At the Pentagon, defence officials said the US military's Central Command would move up to 600 members of its headquarters staff from Florida to the Gulf Arab state of Qatar, near Iraq, for a three-week exercise in November.

US officials declined comment on speculation the newly expanded base would play a key command role in any invasion of Iraq, but one senior official said they were considering making the shift permanent.

Work at the airbase is due to be completed by December, although Qatar, like other Arab states, has opposed any US military attack on Iraq, and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld played down such talk about the base in June.

Nearly every country in the world, with the exception of Britain and Israel, has expressed grave misgivings about a pre-emptive attack on Iraq, and many want prior approval by the 15-nation UN Security Council of any military action.

Speaking to Newsweek magazine in an interview made public yesterday, former South African President Nelson Mandela joined the chorus of Bush's critics.

"It is clearly a decision that is motivated by George W. Bush's desire to please the arms and oil industries in the United States of America," Mandela said. Iraq has the second largest oil reserves in the world behind Saudi Arabia.

German Finance Minister Hans Eichel said a war could endanger Germany's fragile economic recovery by possibly causing an "explosion" in oil prices. Oil prices, however, eased slightly from their high levels after Bush's speech.

Bulent Ecevit, the prime minister of Iraq's neighbour Turkey, a Nato ally whose cooperation would likely be vital to US military action, again voiced his opposition, saying the possibility of an attack was "a sword dangling over our heads."

Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle said after Bush's speech that a number of questions still needed to be answered before Congress would vote to back military action against Iraq.

The South Dakota Democrat said lawmakers needed to know how much backing Bush had from the international community, the risks and costs of a military strike, how that action would affect the overall war on terrorism, and what plans there were for building a post-Saddam government.