Bush dismisses Iraqi 'trickery'

THE United States last night insisted that if Iraq obeys UN orders to destroy its ballistic missiles, the move will still leave Baghdad far short of UN demands and not stop the march toward a possible war.

President George W Bush "views this as continued trickery, continued deception. I think it's fair to say that the Iraqi regime is a deception wrapped in a lie inside a fraud," said White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.

In Madrid, British Prime Minister Tony Blair dismissed Iraq's pledge to begin dismantling its missiles.

"The moment I heard earlier in the week that Saddam Hussein was saying he would not destroy the missiles was the moment I knew that later in the week he would announce, just before Dr Blix reported, that he would indeed destroy these missiles," Blair said.

"This is not a time for games." Blair said after talks with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar.

Iraq said it would todayOK obey UN orders and destroy its al-Samoud 2 ballistic missiles whose 93 mile range exceeds the UN limit set in 1991.

The US reaction was that the missiles represented only the tip of the iceberg and that Baghdad was trying to mask the fact that it has mass stores of weapons of mass destruction it is required to disarm under UN resolution 1441.

"If we go to war, we are going to go to war because Iraq continues to have 26,000 litres of anthrax, 38,000 litres of botulin, 1.5 tons of nerve agent, 6,500 aerial chemical bombs,"The Iraqi move complicated the US-British push to gain Security Council support for a new UN resolution that would set the stage for war.

With France saying there was no Security Council majority for the resolution and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov threatening a veto, US officials still believed it was possible to get the nine needed votes to gain passage from the 15-member Security Council.

Bush, Secretary of State Colin Powell, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others are engaged in an intensive diplomatic effort to gain passage of the resolution.

Bush needs the resolution as a show of international unity behind his drive for a war to disarm Iraq's alleged weapons and topple Hussein.

Bush spoke by phone on Thursday to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who like the leaders of France and China have said inspectors should be given more time.

US officials refused to predict the ultimate outcome, but held out hope of getting to nine votes with no veto from any of the other four permanent members, Russia, China, France and Britain.

"We don't take at this point anybody's vote for granted and we'll see how they vote. We haven't seen anybody definitively take a position on the resolution that is irrevocable," said one senior administration official.

Another official, noting the November 8 passage of resolution 1441 was 15-0, said: "Nobody is counting on 15-0 this time, but we think we can get to nine."

The United States is building a large military force in the Gulf region for a possible war with Iraq, including about 200,000 ground troops.

Bush has said the US will act against Iraq with a coalition of like-minded nations with or without UN backing.

Bush told USA Today in an interview published yesterday: "I've thought long and hard about the loss of life. But I realise and firmly believe that the risk of doing nothing in other words, if we just sit back and say, 'Well, we hope Saddam Hussein changes' far exceeds the risk of taking whatever action may be necessary to disarm him."