WASHINGTON, Sept 17: US Secretary of State Colin Powell on Friday expressed disapproval of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's description of the US-led war in Iraq as illegal , saying the comment was "not a very useful statement to make at this point".

"What does it gain anyone? We should all be gathering around the idea of helping the Iraqis, not getting into these kinds of side issues," Mr Powell said in an interview with The Washington Times.

"I'm sure I will have the opportunity to talk to Kofi about this," he added. Mr Annan's comments, made in an interview with the BBC over the weekend, have annoyed the Bush administration and its allies that toppled Saddam Hussein last year.

The UN chief said the United States and its allies should have sought an explicit Security Council resolution authorizing the war. "From our point of view, from the [UN carter] point of view, it was illegal," said Mr Annan.

Mr Powell said the US constitution gave the United States the right to act in self-defence without the UN's approval, but argued that the Iraq war itself was justified by Saddam's 'material breach' of many UN resolutions on his weapons programmes.

"What we did was totally consistent with international law," he insisted. Officials in Britain, Australia, Bulgaria and Poland have also rejected Mr Annan's argument.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard, in a re-election race in which his support for the Iraq war is a crucial issue, said in a radio interview: "The legal advice that we had, and I tabled it at the time, was that the action was entirely valid in international law terms."