NEW YORK, Jan 25: In an effort to defuse tension with France and Germany, the Bush administration is considering a delay of possibly several weeks before seeking a United Nations resolution about Iraq’s compliance with Security Council resolutions, The New York Times reported on Saturday quoting administration officials.

The Times said that the administration officials were willing to accept a delay to allow inspectors to continue their work in Iraq after they report their findings on Monday. During that time, they said, the administration would try to make a more persuasive case to the allies for a possible military action in Iraq.

However, the officials made it clear that they did not want the inspections to last three or four more months.

The paper noted that the change in tone came after a week in which the administration found itself in a growing confrontation with traditional allies like France and Germany, and opposed in the United Nations Security Council by China and Russia, the two permanent members having veto power.

Faced with rising pressure to lay out the strongest possible case on Iraq, the administration is engaged in a fierce internal debate over how much intelligence information about Iraq’s weapons programmes should be released to the public or to the United Nations inspectors searching for incriminating evidence, the officials told the paper.

“We’ve battled the agency on this a dozen times over the last five years,” an administration official told the paper, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency.

Senior officials at the Defence and State departments point out that there are severe limits on what they can release to the public and still avoid compromising the people and methods by which they obtained the information.