British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday Iraq could still avoid war, but British officials were quoted as saying they were "very disappointed" by Baghdad's declaration of its arms programs.
In Iraq, UN arms teams set out again for suspect sites after the country's oil minister said it would cooperate fully with the renewed inspection effort to disprove US and British charges that it still possesses weapons of mass destruction.
In Turkey, a senior military official said Ankara had deployed troops and engineers near its border with northern Iraq to prepare for any US-led attack on Baghdad.
"The reason for the deployments is ensuring that the Turkish military is ready in all ways for the possibility of an Iraq operation," he said. He gave no figures but local sources put it at 10,000-15,000 troops.
Writing in Britain's Financial Times, Blair argued that Britain must continue preparing for military action so that Saddam realizes the threat against him was serious.
Blair's comments appeared ahead of his meeting in London later in the day with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who was expected to warn him that a US-led war on Iraq would have grave consequences for the whole Middle East.
"Sometimes the only way of avoiding war is to be clear that you are prepared to use force," Blair wrote. "Military conflict in Iraq is not inevitable. What is inevitable is that Iraq will no longer be allowed to continue threatening its neighbors and defying the UN."
British officials analyzing a huge dossier on Iraqi arms projects that Baghdad handed the UN this month are "very disappointed," saying much information is missing, the Financial Times reported yesterday.
Their view echoed remarks by US officials and UN diplomats, who said last week the 12,000-page declaration appeared to fall short of the full disclosure required by last month's UN Security Council resolution 1441.
British junior foreign minister Mike O'Brien said, however, it was too early to pass a definitive judgment on the matter.
"Given Saddam Hussein's long history of dishonesty I suspect you and I are sceptical that this will be a full and open account of its weapons of mass destruction," he told BBC radio.
"But this isn't the moment to declare Iraq in breach or indeed in compliance of [UN resolutions]."
Iraq's oil minister Amir Muhammad Rasheed said on Sunday that Baghdad expected the US to try to goad it into providing a pretext for war.
"Iraq won't give the American administration the chance ... to create such a confrontation and a crisis," he said in an interview. "It will cooperate fully with the inspectors to ... show that the Americans and the British are liars."
UN inspectors, who returned last month after a four-year gap to check Iraq's claim that it is now free of banned weapons, set out yesterday to check more installations. The experts visited at least four sites on Sunday.
In London, US President George W. Bush's special envoy for "free Iraqis," Zalmay Khalilzad, said, "We don't want war with Iraq. We want Saddam to comply with UN resolutions, and freedom and liberty for the Iraqi people."
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