Baghdad rejected his speech to the United Nations on Thursday threatening action as "lies and falsification," but many of Bush's potential allies welcomed his attempt to create an international consensus for action.

Bush said on Thursday that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had engaged in a "decade of defiance" of post-Gulf War UN demands by developing weapons of mass destruction. He urged the United Nations to enforce its own resolutions and said if it did not, "action will be unavoidable."

Yesterday he told reporters in New York, at the United Nations: "I am highly doubtful that he'll meet our demands. I hope he does, but I'm highly doubtful."

Asked how quickly he wanted the United Nations to act, Bush said: "There will be deadlines within the resolution ... We're talking days and weeks, not months and years."

Yesterday, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz told reporters in Baghdad: "I will read Bush's speech paragraph by paragraph and I will refute the lies and falsification in it on another occasion."

Aziz rejected the unconditional return of UN arms inspectors, saying the move would not avert US military designs on Baghdad.

"The return of inspectors without conditions will not solve the problem ...because we have had a bad experience with them. Is it clever to repeat an experience that failed and did not prevent aggression?" Aziz told Dubai-based Arab satellite station MBC.

A number of potential allies who have cautioned against unilateral action welcomed Bush's apparent willingness to pursue diplomatic pressure for now.

The European Union praised him for engaging with the United Nations, and urged Baghdad to obey UN resolutions.

Israel kept silent yesterday over Bush's speech, avoiding doing anything that might compromise any US action.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell was meeting all 14 other members of the UN Security Council in New York yesterday to begin the process of agreeing on an ultimatum for Iraq.

Turkey, likely to be a key staging post for a US attack on Iraq but already beset by political turmoil and fearful of economic damage, was clearly pinning its hopes on diplomacy.

Meanwhile Britain's Ministry of Defense dismissed as "highly speculative" a report in the Daily Telegraph newspaper that said British troops would begin deploying to Kuwait within two weeks to prepare to support a possible US-led attack.

The paper said 6,000 troops would begin their biggest British-based exercise since 1998 tomorrow, involving the ferrying of tons of equipment to a military port - but insisted that the exercise was not related to the Iraq crisis.

US Undersecretary of State John Bolton told reporters in Moscow that Washington expected to secure agreement from a skeptical Russia.

(Xinhua News Agency September 14, 2002)