LONDON, Jan 11: British Prime Minister Tony Blair is to hold talks with US President George Bush and chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix “to prevent early military action in Iraq becoming inevitable”, the Times reported on Saturday.

Blair is expected to fly to Washington towards the end of this month to deliver a message that the United Nations should be given “time and space” to deal with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the British daily said.

The prime minister also hopes to speak with Blix, possibly in London, before the weapons inspector delivers his assessment of Iraq’s compliance with UN disarmament demands on Jan 27.

After Blix’s interim report that his inspectors had so far found “no smoking guns” in Iraq, Blair told his cabinet that the assessment on Jan 27 should be regarded only as a staging post rather than as a deadline.

Observers have said that absence of proof that Saddam is developing weapons of mass destruction puts the British government in a tricky position: it would like to loyally support Washington, but is cautious about waging war against Iraq without a green light from the UN.

Blair plans to visit Washington soon after Blix reports to the Security Council, the Times reported.

The prime minister may try to persuade Bush that US-led military action should be delayed until a further report from Blix in February or even March, the right-of-centre broadsheet said.

But it added the two leaders may yet hold a “council of war”, depending on how Saddam responds to Blix’s demands for more answers in the coming three weeks.

In an interview given on Dec 5 but published on Friday, Blair said that Britain and the US would not allow “unreasonable” opposition in the UN to block military action against Iraq if it has clearly breached its responsibility to disarm.

Allowing a breach to go unpunished would send a “very bad signal” to other rogue states considering developing nuclear, chemical or biological weapons capabilities, Blair told Reader’s Digest magazine.

In return for the Anglo-American decision to deal with the problem of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction through the UN, Blair said he and Bush expected the United Nations to agree to act in the case of a breach of Security Council resolution 1441.

“The deal behind going down the UN route was that President Bush and myself were saying: ‘We’ll take the UN route, it’s a multilateral route, we’ll bring everyone to the same place, but the quid pro quo is that if there is a breach, we do act’,” he said.

“What we can’t have is a situation where, if there is a breach and an unreasonable block goes down in the UN, then we simply say to Saddam: ‘You can carry on doing it.’ Because that would send a very bad signal.”—AFP