WASHINGTON, Jan 11: President George Bush risks a major fight with Congress if he should send US troops across Iraq border into Iran, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee warned on Thursday.

“I feel very strongly that the authorisation for the use of force ...explicitly denies you the authority to go into Iran,” Senator Joseph Biden warned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a committee hearing on the president's plan to send thousands more troops to Iraq.

Mr Biden, who this week, declared he would run for the presidency in 2008, said that any move by the administration to launch an incursion into Iran from Iraq would spark a major constitutional battle with the US legislature.

“We will fight that out if the president moves -- I just want the record to show,” said Mr Biden.

“And I would like to have a legal response from the State Department if they think they have the authority to pursue networks or anything else across the border into Iran.” Undertaking such a move, Mr Biden warned Rice `will generate a constitutional confrontation here in the Senate, I predict to you -- at least I will attempt to make it a confrontation’.—AFP