US pledges final push to avoid Iraq war

WASHINGTON pledged one last diplomatic push to avoid war with Iraq yesterday.

The pledge came as Baghdad challenged US President George W Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to back their charge of links between Iraq and al-Qaida.

Following Mr Bush's State of the Union address outlining the case for military action, the White House said the standoff with 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.

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

Mr Bush earlier told congress that 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 Mr Bush not to attack without backing from the United Nations Security Council.

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

Iraqi lawmakers also denounced Mr 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, said.

Mr Bush said the US 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-Qaida network behind the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.

"The dictator of Iraq is not disarming. To the contrary, he is deceiving," Mr Bush told Congress, 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.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair echoed Mr Bush yesterday, linking Iraq with al-Qaida militants, while recasting himself as a global ambassador ahead of possible war against Baghdad.

Blair flies to Washington this week to meet Bush tomorrow, talked to the leaders of France, Canada, Australia, Turkey and Greece on Tuesday, hosts Italian premier Silvio Berlusconi on Wednesday and will stop in Madrid en route to the United States.

"We do know of links between al-Qaida and Iraq we cannot be sure of the exact extent of those links," he told parliament.