WASHINGTON, March 5: US President George Bush said on Wednesday he was confident that a UN resolution seeking authorization for an invasion of Iraq would pass despite a threat from France, Germany and Russia to veto it.

“The president is confident in the ultimate outcome of a U.N. vote,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said while talking to reporters.

“We’ve seen this pattern before where people believe that it’s impossible, or that it’s a very uphill fight for the president to achieve a United Nations outcome. And we saw that that speculation was wrong in 1990. We saw it was wrong in the fall of 2002. And I believe you’ll see again that it’s wrong in 2003,” said Mr Fleischer.