WAR OF WORDS

From wire reports

LONDON -- Iraq has a growing arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, and plans to use them, Prime Minister Tony Blair said Tuesday, unveiling an intelligence dossier to a special session of Parliament.

Blair, who also said Iraq is trying to develop nuclear weapons, told lawmakers his priority is to get inspectors back into Iraq. But he repeatedly expressed enthusiasm for the U.S. goal of "regime change" in Baghdad.

"Iraq, the region and the whole world would be better off" without Saddam Hussein, Blair said in releasing the dossier, which asserts the Iraqi leader has weapons of mass destruction ready to be used within 45 minutes of an order to fight.

Baghdad rejected the British analysis, which also said Iraq was trying to extend the range of its ballistic missiles.

"The British prime minister is serving the campaign of lies led by Zionists against Iraq. Blair is part of this misleading campaign," Iraqi Culture Minister Hammed Youssef Hammadi said in Baghdad.

In Cairo, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri denied Iraq has or is developing weapons of mass destruction, and said Blair was trying to justify a military attack against Baghdad.

French President Jacques Chirac and Chinese Prime Minister Zhu Rongji both said the U.N. Security Council must play a vital role in the crisis.

"I do not think at all that war is unavoidable," Chirac said, adding that U.N. weapons inspectors must be allowed to find out what Saddam has.

"Any military attack on Iraq that does not have the blessing of the Security Council "will lead to severe consequences," Zhu said.

The White House called the dossier "frightening" and praised Blair for his strong defense of the U.S.-led efforts against Saddam. "We don't trust this man, and that's what the Blair report showed today," President Bush said.

Need to invade

Some interpreted Blair's speech as much less hawkish than Bush's attitude toward a need for immediate confrontation with Iraq.

"The Blair administration appears to view the nuclear threat as much less of a threat than the Bush administration does," said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, who participated in U.N. inspections in the 1990s. "I would say it argues against the need to invade Iraq immediately. It argues for the need to get inspectors in there right away and get to the bottom of this."

Blair said that British intelligence had concluded that U.N. sanctions were hindering Iraqi attempts to import crucial material needed to enrich uranium for bombs. As long as sanctions remain effective, the dossier reported, Iraq would not be able to produce the bomb-grade uranium needed for a weapon. If the sanctions were dropped, "it would take Iraq at least five years to produce sufficient fissile material for a weapon indigenously," the British Joint Intelligence Committee concluded.

The 50-page dossier -- which appeared to contain little new evidence -- said "Iraq has military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons," and has tried to acquire "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa.

"Unless we face up to the threat, not only do we risk undermining the authority of the U.N., whose resolutions he defies, but more importantly ... we place at risk the lives and prosperity of our own people," Blair said in an introduction to the report.

Blair cited the Iraqi attempt to import 60,000 aluminum tubes as possible evidence that Iraqi scientists might be trying to build sophisticated centrifuges used in to enrich uranium. But he noted "there is no definitive intelligence that it is destined for a nuclear program." His remarks were somewhat more cautious that those of Bush, who simply described the aluminum tubes as "used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon." Blair said Iraq was attempting to import a variety of other material needed for an enrichment program, such as magnets and vacuum pumps. He also revealed that Iraq had sought "significant quantities of uranium from Africa, despite having no active civil nuclear power program that could require it." Albright said the uranium would presumably be in a crude form known as "yellow cake," and would have to go through the refinement and enrichment process.

Blair is Bush's closest European ally, but faces dissent within his governing Labor Party and a reported rift in his Cabinet over an Iraqi war. As he spoke Tuesday, several hundred anti-war protesters gathered outside Parliament, including some riding a double-decker bus and singing John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance."