Britain seeks to douse US rhetoric on Iraq

LONDON - The West could set Iraqi President Saddam Hussein a final deadline to admit United Nations weapons inspectors under a plan being considered by the British Government to avert United States-led attacks.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw revealed the plan yesterday as the diplomatic rift between London and Washington over military action against Iraq deepened.

A chorus of countries this week spoke out against any attack on Iraq, including US allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Germany and Japan.

And amid growing international worries over unilateral American action, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has compared his country's policy of trying to remove Saddam to Sir Winston Churchill standing alone against Hitler.

Downing St reiterated that Britain's priority was for the Iraqi leader to comply with a UN Security Council demand to allow inspection of his weapons facilities.

Straw, who discussed the crisis with Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday, said the Government would consider a call by the Commons foreign affairs committee to propose a deadline to readmit the inspectors, who left in 1998.

How other council members would react to the deadline proposal is not known.

The British comments reflect concerns over the Bush Administration's increasingly hawkish language. In calling for "pre-emptive action" against Iraq, Vice-President Dick Cheney has played down the significance of weapons inspections.

Rumsfeld reminded his audience about the scepticism faced by Churchill in the years before World War II, when the world was far from agreed about Hitler's menace.

"There was no unanimity," he said. "There were all kinds of diplomats running around, holding meetings with him. There were people saying, 'Don't do anything, he'll stop. He won't do anything terrible'.

"It wasn't until each country got attacked that they stopped and said, 'Well, maybe Winston Churchill was right'. Maybe that lone voice expressing concern about what was happening was right."

The Daily Telegraph reported that Bush's bedside reading has been a new history book which argues that the best war leaders are politicians who harass and overrule their generals.

So influential is Supreme Command by Eliot Cohen, it is seen by some as a book that will stiffen the resolve of the President and many of his senior advisers after high-level leaks from generals opposed to war.

Bush let it be known recently that he was reading the book, which argues that generals are cautious, slow to change and haunted by the ghosts of past conflicts.

Supreme Command takes as its example four bulldog-like war leaders: Churchill, Abraham Lincoln, David Ben-Gurion and Georges Clemenceau, the French statesman behind the dictum: "War is too important to be left to the generals."

The Iraqi Government, meanwhile, took reporters on a tour of what it said was an insecticide plant 100km west of Baghdad that had been wrongly stamped a weapons factory, continuing a diplomatic and public relations campaign to combat allegations that it is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.

The UN has said the plant is suspect, and wants trained inspectors to have full access to any site.

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