President Bush has ratcheted up the pressure on Baghdad to obey U.N. resolutions as Germany and influential Arab nations voiced misgivings about any assault on Iraq. Malaysia and Cuba made clear their opposition to military action and Japan has expressed reservations. Jordan and Syria present their views to the U.N. General Assembly on Sunday. Bush, speaking from the presidential retreat in Camp David, Maryland, on Saturday urged the United Nations "to show some backbone" on Iraq, and made clear he was prepared to confront President Saddam Hussein with or without world support.

"Saddam Hussein has defied the United Nations 16 times. Not once, not twice, 16 times he has defied the United Nations," said Bush, who this week challenged the world body to enforce its resolutions on Iraqi disarmament. "Enough is enough."

Germany acknowledged the need to keep pushing Iraq to readmit U.N. arms inspectors and bow to U.N. demands, but spoke against any automatic recourse to war that might destabilize the Middle East and compromise the struggle against terrorism.

"Even if it becomes very difficult, we have to do everything to find a diplomatic solution," German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer told the 190-nation General Assembly.

Germany is among the most vocal critics of military action against Iraq, which all Arab countries publicly oppose.

And Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he told Bush on Friday that "the use of force is a last resort when there are no other options."

Bush, by offering the United Nations a chance to act, has begun to assuage widespread international concern at the prospect that the United States might decide on its own, or perhaps with Britain, to invade Iraq to topple Saddam. This remains a possibility, as Bush again made clear.

'WE'LL DEAL WITH IT'

With Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of America's most loyal allies in continental Europe, beside him at Camp David, Bush said that the United States would tackle Iraq if the United Nations did not.

"This is a chance for the United Nations to show some backbone," he said, but added: "Make no mistake about it, if we have to deal with the problem, we'll deal with it."

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, whose country is Washington's closest military ally, urged the United Nations to take decisive action against Iraq for defying its authority.

"We cannot let Iraq go on defying a decade of Security Council resolutions," Straw told the assembly, referring to U.N. demands at the end of the 1991 Gulf War for Iraq to scrap its chemical, biological, nuclear and ballistic weapons programs. "If we do, we will find that our resolutions are dismissed by aggressors everywhere as mere words."

Britain will play a key role in drafting one or more new Security Council resolutions likely to set a deadline for Iraq to accept arms inspectors and comply with demands for the destruction of any banned weapons, or face military action.

IRAQ MINISTER MAKES ROUNDS

Iraq says it has no weapons of mass destruction and refuses to accept the unconditional return of U.N. arms inspectors who left the country just before U.S.-British air strikes in 1998.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri linked any return of the arms monitors to other issues, including the lifting of 12-year-old U.N. sanctions imposed for Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

"Resolutions consist of other topics -- not only return of inspectors," he said after meeting French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on the fringes of the General Assembly.

On Saturday, Sabri also met Fischer, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kwaguchiu and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, all of whom told Iraq to let inspectors in.

Arab foreign ministers delivered a similar message to their Iraqi colleague.

"We told Iraq to the letter: 'We want the inspectors to return and that with them peace and security will return and the sufferings of the Iraqi people will end,"' Lebanese Foreign Minister Mahmoud Hammoud, whose country is current Arab League chairman, told reporters on Saturday.

America's Arab allies, who see Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands as a greater peril to the region than Iraq, are caught between their hostility to any war against Iraq and their fear of antagonizing the world's only superpower.

"We find no justification for any military operation against Iraq," Youssef bin Alawi bin Abdullah, Oman's foreign minister, told the assembly.

PHOTO CAPTION


U.S. President George W. Bush speaks to the press before meeting with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (rear) while at the Camp David presidential retreat in rural Maryland, September 14, 2002. The president will continue to seek support for his administration's efforts against Iraq. (Larry Downing/