US: The United States has said it has enlisted support from NATO allies on the threat posed by Iraq, but alliance partner Russia said it was more at risk from rebels based in Georgia than from Baghdad.
The US Secretary of Defence, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday said the US had presented evidence to its allies proving that there was a link between Baghdad and the al-Qaeda network, which was blamed for the September 11th attacks on US cities last year.
But while the US Secretary of State, Mr Colin Powell, declared in London that regime change in Baghdad was the best way to ensure that Iraq disarmed, Mr Rumsfeld said Washington had made no decision yet on whether to take military action.
"You can be certain that if and when the president decides to do something that there'll be other nations assisting," he told a news conference after a two-day meeting of NATO defence ministers in Warsaw.
He said that some of the ministers - who are mostly from European states hesitant to back Washington's drive to remove the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, from power - had approached him "over the transom" in Warsaw to express their support.
Russia however, attending the NATO meeting in its new role as an alliance partner, said Iraq was less worrying than the attacks it says are being launched on its soil by Chechen rebels hiding with impunity in neighbouring Georgia.
"We have incontrovertible proof that the Georgian authorities are not taking effective action against this international terrorism," the Russian Defence Minister, Mr Sergei Ivanov, told the Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita.
Georgia has appealed for US support against Russia and says the thousand troops it has sent to Georgia's remote Pankisi gorge are making headway in ousting rebels. Russia scoffs at Tblisi's efforts as insufficient.
The British Defence Secretary, Mr Geoff Hoon, said there could be no link made between Iraq and Georgia, and suggested that Moscow intensify dialogue with its neighbour to resolve the problem.
"We recognise that this is a very real threat to the Russian Federation and one they are clearly entitled to deal with, certainly on their own side of the border and - in co-operation with Georgia - across the border," he told reporters.
Mr Rumsfeld, noting that Mr Ivanov had raised the Georgia issue at the NATO meeting yesterday, insisted that there should be no bombing of the Pankisi gorge area.
The alliance's 19 defence ministers discussed Iraq over dinner on Tuesday after a closed-door briefing by US intelligence officials on Saddam's efforts to equip himself with weapons of mass destruction.
They were also handed copies of the dossier of the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, on Iraq, which asserted that the country could launch a non-conventional attack within 45 minutes.
Russian Foreign Minister Mr Igor Ivanov dismissed yesterday the "propaganda furore" surrounding the dossier, saying the return of weapons inspectors to Baghdad was the main priority.
The US Secretary of State Mr Colin Powell however said "regime change" in Baghdad was the best way to ensure that Iraq disarmed.
The campaign to convince Europeans that Saddam is an urgent threat comes as the US tries to prepare a UN Security Council resolution to stiffen a weapons inspections regime that will be acceptable to veto-wielding United Nations partners.
Russia and France have not accepted the need for the resolution to include an ultimatum which, if defied, would authorise the US to launch a devastating attack on Iraq that would end the rule of Saddam.
The US worries that without a deadline backed by the threat of force, Iraq will string out weapons inspections as in the past.
Saddam Hussein was facing his "last chance" to avoid giving the US a legal basis for action against him, according to China's official English-language China newspaper.A strongly worded editorial said he must fulfil a promise to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors fully or risk losing support against a US invasion. "An Iraqi failure to satisfy the inspectors' requests might give Bush the excuse he craves to forcefully carry out his coveted 'regime change'," it said.- (Reuters)