Time UN showed backbone says Bush

By ALISTAIR LYON

NEW YORK - George W. Bush has ratcheted up the pressure on Baghdad to obey United Nations resolutions as Germany and influential Arab nations voiced misgivings about any assault on Iraq.

Malaysia and Cuba made clear their opposition to military action and Japan has expressed reservations. Jordan and Syria were to present their views to the UN General Assembly overnight.

The US President, speaking from the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, yesterday, urged the UN "to show some backbone" on Iraq and made clear he was prepared to confront President Saddam Hussein with or without world support.

"Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations 16 times. Not once, not twice, 16 times he has defied the United Nations," said Bush, who has challenged the world body to enforce its resolutions on Iraqi disarmament. "Enough is enough."

Germany acknowledged the need to keep pushing Iraq to readmit UN arms inspectors and bow to UN demands, but spoke against any automatic recourse to war that might destabilise the Middle East and compromise the struggle against terrorism.

"Even if it becomes very difficult, we have to do everything to find a diplomatic solution," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told the 190-nation General Assembly.

Germany is among the most vocal critics of military action against Iraq, which all Arab countries publicly oppose.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he told Bush that "the use of force is a last resort when there are no other options".

Bush, by offering the UN a chance to act, has begun to assuage widespread international concern at the prospect that the US might decide on its own, or perhaps with Britain, to invade Iraq to topple Saddam. This remains a possibility, as Bush again made clear.

With Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of America's most loyal allies in continental Europe, beside him at Camp David, Bush said the US would tackle Iraq if the UN did not.

"This is a chance for the United Nations to show some backbone," he said, but added: "Make no mistake about it, if we have to deal with the problem, we'll deal with it."

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose country is Washington's closest military ally, urged the UN to take decisive action against Iraq for defying its authority.

"We cannot let Iraq go on defying a decade of Security Council resolutions," Straw told the assembly, referring to UN demands at the end of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraq to scrap its chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic weapons programmes. "If we do, we will find that our resolutions are dismissed by aggressors everywhere as mere words."



Iraq says it has no weapons of mass destruction and refuses to accept the unconditional return of UN arms inspectors who left the country just before US-British airstrikes in 1998.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri linked any return of the arms monitors to other issues, including the lifting of 12-year-old UN sanctions imposed for Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"Resolutions consist of other topics - not only return of inspectors," he said after meeting French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin.

Sabri also met Fischer, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kwaguchiu and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, all of whom told Iraq to let inspectors in.

Arab foreign ministers delivered a similar message.

"We told Iraq to the letter: 'We want the inspectors to return and that with them peace and security will return and the sufferings of the Iraqi people will end'," said Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud, whose country is current Arab League chairman.

America's Arab allies are caught between their hostility to any war against Iraq and their fear of antagonisng the world's only superpower.

- REUTERS

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