U.S. Works to Consolidate Support at U.N.

WASHINGTON —  WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration worked Thursday to consolidate support among European allies for a quick confrontation with Iraq over its weapons program, opening what the White House called “a very active window of diplomacy.”

President Bush conferred with visiting Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who afterward effusively backed the tough U.S. stance. Bush is to meet today at Camp David with another key ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

After being rocked by strong resistance recently from France and Germany, U.S. and British officials say Bush and Blair will work on a strategy for winning support for a U.N. resolution authorizing force against Iraq if Saddam Hussein does not give up what the United States says is his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

The effort will be waged over four to eight weeks of intense diplomacy at the United Nations, led by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and his British counterpart.

“It won’t continue forever,” White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said of the diplomatic effort. After that, he said, “the president will have to make a judgment about whether Saddam Hussein will indeed disarm on his own, or whether he will have to make the decision to use military force to disarm Saddam Hussein.”

Although a midafternoon visit to the White House by Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al Faisal prompted speculation that Hussein might respond to the growing threat of war by seeking exile, perhaps in Saudi Arabia, Bush said the demand that Iraq disarm would not be relaxed even if its president left the country.

“The goal of disarming Iraq still stays the same, regardless of who is in charge of the government. And that’s very important for the Iraqi people to know,” Bush said at a picture-taking session with Berlusconi. Recognizing European concerns about the impact of a war, Bush said that any deployment of troops would be quickly followed by “food and medicine and supplies to the Iraqi people.”

Berlusconi has been a strong supporter of Bush’s Iraq policy, as he again made clear Thursday.

“I’m here today to help my friend President Bush to convince everybody that this is in the interest of everybody,” he said. “And if we are all united -- the European Union, the United States, the Federation of Russia, everybody, all the other states under the United Nations -- then Saddam Hussein will understand that he will have no other option but to reveal the arms and to destroy them.”

Bush also met briefly at the White House with the foreign minister of Pakistan, Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri, who told reporters later that the United States must “be mindful” that in Pakistan, the rest of the Islamic world and in Europe, “there will be reaction” if the United States leads a war against Iraq.

The flurry of diplomacy signaled an effort by the administration to demonstrate it is paying attention to concerns about military conflict and is taking every step to avoid war -- and to gain the broadest support if an attack is launched.

Blair met Thursday in Madrid with Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, who said he hoped the U.N. Security Council would approve a second resolution demonstrating new unity in facing down Iraq.

The British prime minister also favors a second resolution before going to war. Last fall, after weeks of diplomatic maneuvering, the United States won the council’s 15-0 approval for the aggressive weapons inspections the U.N. is now trying to conduct in Iraq.

The Bush administration has declined to say whether it will seek a second resolution.

“The president is serious about consultation. The president is serious about diplomacy. He hopes it will work, and he wants to give it time to work,” Fleischer said.

“What you are seeing now is a very active window of diplomacy,” he said.

Diplomatic sources said Bush has agreed in principle to try to seek a second resolution. The meeting with Blair will focus on ways to win Security Council approval.

On Capitol Hill, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage and John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., were told to take greater steps to convince allies and Americans that Hussein has failed to cooperate with arms inspectors and has defied the U.N. by continuing to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Without convincing evidence that Iraq is hiding such weapons, Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) said at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, few leaders of Europe’s key powers will be willing “to stand up in the face of public opinion in their communities that runs from 95% to 70% against this war.”

“We’ve got to help them,” he said.

Armitage refused to say which countries had signed up as part of the coalition that the administration asserts will be at the United States’ side if troops invade Iraq. But he said nine were offering troops and others had offered use of their bases, overflight rights or other assistance to U.S. forces en route to a war zone.

Italy, where the United States already has a large military presence, said this week that it would allow U.S. warplanes to refuel at its bases.

Armitage also expanded on the administration’s assertion that the Al Qaeda terrorist network has links to Iraq.

He said the White House believes that the killing of a U.S. Embassy worker in Jordan last year “was orchestrated by an Al Qaeda member who’s resident in Baghdad.”

Administration officials said Armitage was referring to Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian and suspected Al Qaeda operative who received treatment at a Baghdad hospital in late 2001 for a leg wound received in Afghanistan.

But intelligence officials said there was no evidence that Zarqawi was in Baghdad for any other purpose or that he could be found there now. He is believed to have left Baghdad after having the leg amputated and may be in northern Iraq, in Kurdish territory not controlled by Hussein.

In an echo of Iraq’s efforts before the 1991 Persian Gulf War to ease tensions with demonstrations of cooperation, Iraqi authorities have invited the U.N.’s chief weapons inspectors back to the country for talks sometime before Feb. 10.

Hans Blix, one of the two top weapons inspectors, delivered an unexpectedly negative report Monday on the inspections work so far, saying that Iraq had given the inspectors access to all weapons sites they requested but had offered few answers to questions about unaccounted weapons stockpiles. Blix’s complaint that Baghdad is blocking U2 surveillance flights, and that no scientists had agreed to private interviews, bolstered the administration’s claims that Iraq was ignoring the U.N.’s demands -- a point the White House has made repeatedly as it seeks to build support for forcing Iraq’s disarmament.

Blix’s counterpart at the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, gave a much more positive assessment, saying his team had few outstanding questions on Iraq’s nuclear weapons programs.

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Times staff writers Greg Miller, Maura Reynolds and Richard Simon in Washington and Maggie Farley at the United Nations contributed to this report.