GLASGOW, Feb 15: British Prime Minister Tony Blair, pinned down by growing domestic and international resistance to a US-led war on Iraq, accepted on Saturday to give UN inspectors some more time to ferret out Saddam Hussein’s alleged stocks of weapons of mass destruction.

In his first reaction to Friday’s crucial report to the UN Security Council by chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix, Blair said the United Nations must remain at the forefront of global efforts to rid Iraq of suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

“There will be more time given to inspections,” and Blix will report back to the Security Council on February 28, Blair told the spring conference of his Labour Party in the Scottish city of Glasgow.

But he argued once again that the crisis cannot be allowed to drag on forever, given the way that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has flaunted 12 years of UN demands to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction.

“The time needed is not the time it takes the inspectors to discover the weapons,” the prime minister said.

“They are not a detective agency. We played that game in the 1990s. The time is the time necessary to make a judgement — is Saddam prepared to cooperate fully or not?”

“If he is, the inspectors can take as much time as they want. If he is not, if this is a repeat of the 1990s — and I think it is — then let us be under no doubt what is at stake.”

Blair also dismissed Iraq’s proposal Friday to adopt a law to outlaw weapons of mass destruction.

“To anyone familiar with Saddam’s tactics of deception and evasion, there is a weary sense of deja vu... The concessions are suspect,” the prime minister said. “Unfortunately, the weapons are real.”

Blair, who is US President George W. Bush’s staunchest ally on Iraq, took the Labour rostrum as opponents of a US-led war on Iraq gathered by the tens of thousands in London under cold but sunny skies for a march on Hyde Park.

Organizers and police expected as many as 500,000 people, if not more, to turn out — making the ‘Don’t Attack Iraq’ march potentially the biggest demonstration to be seen in the British capital in years.

Protesters were also out in Glasgow, but their plans to drown out Blair’s words with peace chants were foiled when the timing of his speech — one of the most important in his political career — was moved up at the last minute.

The Labour Party is badly split on Iraq, reflecting the overall mood in Britain where, in a BBC poll released this past week, 45 percent of citizens were opposed to any war, with or without a fresh UN resolution.

Blair — who has committed 30,000 troops, 17 warships and some 100 warplanes to a potential war — is also at loggerheads with France and Germany, which are using Blix’s report to shore up their case for more inspections.

Faced with such resistance, Blair framed his case for tough action Saturday in moral terms, reiterating his deep concern about global security under threat from terrorists and “rogue states” in the post-Cold War era.

“We don’t wake up and fear Russia and China as we did. America is not focused on the struggle for ideological hegemony... The threat is chaos, disorder, instability,” he said.

On the London peace march, Blair recalled the legacy of Saddam’s rule: “If there are 500,000 on that march, that is still less than the number of people whose deaths Saddam has been responsible for. If there are one million, that is still less than the number of people who died in the wars he started.”

On the United Nations, he said: “If we show weakness now, if we allow the plea for more time to become just an excuse for prevarication until the moment for action passes, then it will not only be Saddam who is repeating history.”

“The menace — and not just from Saddam — will grow. The authority of the UN will be lost. And the conflict, when it comes, will be more bloody. Yes, let the United Nations be the way to deal with Saddam — but let the United Nations mean what it says, and do what it means.” —AFP