LONDON: Tony Blair on Saturday night made clear that war with Iraq remained virtually inevitable as President George W. Bush continued his inexorable steps towards military conflict with Saddam Hussein.

As the British aircraft carrier Ark Royal left Portsmouth on Saturday, Downing Street officials said that military action is still “more likely than not” and that Britain would back America, which is still set on war with Iraq.

Despite stressing that Bush would exhaust “all avenues” with the UN before he takes action, British and US officials sent out strong messages that Saddam was facing military action if he did not agree to disarm.

Ark Royal, the Navy’s flagship, set sail for the Gulf with an 800-strong crew. The ship will head a 16-vessel naval task group on exercises in the area, involving more than 8,000 Navy and Marine personnel. Rear Admiral David Snelson, the commander of UK Maritime Forces, stressed on Saturday that the move did not mean the force was committed to operations against Iraq, but added: “There is no doubt that British forces are ready if they are needed.” It will be the biggest deployment of British military forces since the Gulf war.

Ark Royal’s departure came as the US Defence Secretary, Dona-ld Rumsfeld, gave the green light to the deployment of nearly 35,000 American troops, the single biggest order since the Pent-agon began to build up its forces in the Gulf last month. The troops, who will leave over the next fortnight, will bring the US’s total strength in the area to more than 100,000 by the end of January. They include two amphibious task forces, each 7,000 Marines strong.

Number 10 and MoD officials said reports last week that the chances of military action had receded were “wide of the mark” and that Hans Blix, the head of the UN arms inspection team, would begin “building the pressure” on Iraq over the next fortnight.

The process will start with an official visit to European capitals at the end of this week. Blix will meet Blair in London on Friday, where he will be shown new intelligence material on Saddam’s biological and chemical weapons.

Number 10 also said it had evidence that the UN team’s work in Iraq was being bugged by Iraqi intelligence services.

“We know he [Saddam] has got weapons of mass destruction,” said one Number 10 source. “If Blix finds anything, then that will be a breach of the [UN] resolution. If Blix’s work is frustrated, then that will also be a breach. Saddam has to actually disarm or we take action. We are still clear where we are going.”

Blix will also visit Paris and Brussels before flying on to Baghdad, where he will tell the Iraqis that he expects them to be “more pro- active” in cooperating with the inspections. In a minute of the statement Blix made to the UN Security Council, in which he had admitted he had found no “smoking gun”, he said Saddam still had “dark corners and caves” that he had not revealed.

Blix will also announce that high-altitude reconnaissance planes will start flying over Iraq as part of the inspection process. Number 10 believes that the increasing capability of the UN team will mean that they will find evidence that Saddam is in breach of UN resolutions.

“Let’s not forget that the UN inspectors only started using helicopters last week,” the Number 10 official said. “They have only been there for a few weeks and Saddam has become very practised at hiding what he has and moving it around very quickly. He will only be able to keep that up for so long.”

Blix’s next report, on January 27, will be an “update” on the inspections process and is unlikely to reveal an immediate breach by Iraq. Government officials are now looking towards the Blix report on March 1 as the possible trigger for military action, believing that the UN weapons inspection team will become increasingly frustrated at Saddam’s lack of co-operation.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service