WASHINGTON, Sept 4: The Washington Post said in a report on Thursday that US Secretary of State Colin Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff had conspired to press President George Bush to back a new UN resolution on Iraq over the objections of the Pentagon.

Mr Powell denied the report, saying it was “total fiction” and that plans for the resolution had been approved on their merits by Mr Bush, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top presidential aides.

Citing unnamed senior officials, the Post said Mr Powell had begun a secret campaign in July to convince Mr Bush that the Pentagon’s plans for the occupation of Iraq were not working and that a new UN resolution was needed.

It said Mr Powell, a former general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had worked on the proposal with members of the joint chiefs despite objections from Mr Rumsfeld and other hawkish top civilian leaders at the Pentagon who believed the United States could and should go it alone in Iraq.

Armed with support from the joint chiefs, the Post reported that Mr Powell had presented Mr Bush on Tuesday with a near fair accompli — the plan to seek a broader UN mandate for the Iraq operation — and that the president agreed.

“Thus a long and high-stakes bureaucratic struggle resolved, with the combined clout of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the State Department persuading a reluctant White House that the administration’s Iraq occupation policy, devised by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, simply was not working,” the Post reported.

Mr Powell rejected that account. “It’s all fiction,” he said. “It didn’t happen. There is no such collusion, and there was no need for any such collusion.”

“There is absolutely no substance to this mischievous, fictional story about Colin Powell and the Joint Chiefs of Staff colluding in some way,” he said. “We didn’t do it.”

Mr Powell said Mr Bush, Mr Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and others had all been aware of plans for the resolution and had agreed with them. —AFP