"Everybody is surprised by the strange precedent of the United States," an Iraqi Foreign Ministry spokesman said in a statement onBush's meeting on Wednesday in Washington with Hans Blix, head of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, and Mohamed El Baradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The spokesman accused the United States of seeking to put pressure on the United Nations to pass a new resolution "that distorts facts and imposes impossible and unacceptable conditions to wage a colonial war on Iraq."

"We hope that the UN Secretariat and Security Council should stop the (US) pressure on these two officials and urge them not to yield to the pressure," the statement said.

Iraq has been under sweeping UN sanctions since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and the embargo will not be lifted until the United Nations has verified that Iraq has eliminated all of its weapons of mass destruction and means to launch them.

Continuous spats about alleged espionage activities between Iraqand the UN arms inspectors, who were commissioned to verify Iraq's elimination of weapons of mass destruction, led to the crisis in 1997 and 1998, and eventually the brief air war against Baghdad from Dec. 17-19, 1998.

In an official letter addressed to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Sept. 16, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said his government was ready to accept the UN weapons inspectors unconditionally.

But the United States has persuaded the arms inspectors to postpone their return to Iraq, while the UN Security Council is seeking a compromise over a tough US-proposed draft resolution on Iraq's disarmament.

(Xinhua News Agency November 1, 2002)