The British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, has warned the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, that he must disarm voluntarily or be "disarmed by force."
At the same time Mr Blair has spoken of "the dilemma" facing his government as it struggles to find the right balance in warning people of the increasing likelihood of a terrorist attack on Britain without unduly alarming them - "taking preventive measures without destroying normal life".
He has also stressed again the urgent need to "quickly" advance the Middle East peace process, declaring: "Until this [a settlement\] happens, this issue hangs like a dark shadow over our world, chilling our relations with each other, poisoning the understanding of our motives, providing the cover under which the fanatics build strength."
As the British government continued preparations for war in anticipation of possible Iraqi obstruction of UN weapons inspectors, Mr Blair told guests at the Lord Mayor's annual Mansion House banquet in London last night: "There is no dispute with the Iraqi people. Iraq's territorial integrity will be absolute. The dispute is with Saddam. It is now up to him as to how it is resolved: by peace or by conflict."
Last Friday, Mr Blair said, had been an important day for the world.
"After months of debate, the United Nations came together and made its will plain. Saddam now has to decide: he can either disarm voluntarily, accepting the unanimous decision of the UN Security Council, or he can defy the world, in which case he will be disarmed by force."
By tradition devoting his Lord Mayor's speech to international affairs, Mr Blair said weapons of mass destruction were "but one aspect of the new dangers we now face."
Following the end of the Cold War and the once great ideological battle between communism and Western liberal democracy, Mr Blair said decision-makers now were pre-occupied with a different danger.
"It is extremism driven by fanaticism," he said, "personified either in terrorist groups or rogue states. As we have seen from recent atrocities, whether the attacks of September 11th, Bali, the attack on the French ship off Yemen, the Russian theatre siege, today's breed of terrorist knows no bounds - of geography, of inhumanity or of scale."
They were looking for ever more dramatic and devastating outrages to inflict and there was an added dimension: "It is not just that they care nothing for the lives of others, they care nothing for the loss of their own life."
Mr Blair said "barely a day goes by" without some new piece of intelligence coming via the security services about a threat to British interests. In assessing it, he said, "there is a balance to be struck".
Noting criticisms of the general US warning to Americans before the Bali attack occurred and the suggestion that governments had known something but held it back from the public, Mr Blair said: "If on the basis of a general warning we were to shut down all the places that al-Qaeda might be considering for attack, we would be doing their job for them . . .
"If a terrorist thought all he had to do to shut down the travel industry for example was to issue a threat against our airports, we really would be conceding defeat in the war against terrorism. So we make a judgment, day by day, week by week."