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The United States appeared further isolated in its attitude towards Baghdad, with most of the world saying UN arms inspectors needed more time to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Even Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of staunch US ally Britain, while condemning Iraq's attitude to the inspectors as "a charade", said the continuation of the searches was up to the UN Security Council - not any one state.

Following reports from the UN arms chiefs to the Security Council on their first two months of operation, the United States said Baghdad was not cooperating with the inspectors or complying with UN resolutions to give up weapons of mass destruction Washington says it possesses.

Germany, France, Russia and Canada said the arms experts needed more time, as did Secretary-General Amr Moussa of the 22-member Arab League and states neighbouring Iraq.

UN weapons chief Hans Blix said Iraq had cooperated in opening sites for inspection but had fallen short of filling in gaps in December's declaration on its weapons programmes. He said further moves were up to the Security Council.

The head of the UN's nuclear watchdog agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, told the Security Council two months of inspections had produced no evidence Iraq was reviving its nuclear arms programme, dismantled by the UN in the 1990s. He sought more time.

While Straw called Baghdad's performance "a charade", he hedged his bets on how soon a US-led assault on Iraq might go ahead.

He said after a meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels: "The decision about continuation of inspections is a matter for the Security Council, not for any one state."

US has threatened war

The United States has threatened a unilateral attack on Iraq if Baghdad does not give up biological, chemical and nuclear weaponry which Iraq says it does not have.

Baghdad said it had complied with UN demands.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell did not mince his words: "Iraq's time for choosing peaceful disarmament is fast coming to an end."

He gave no hint on when a decision to go to war might come. He said Washington would consult its allies over the next week and after that, it would decide what to do.

"The issue is not how much more time the inspectors need to search in the dark. It is how much more time Iraq should be given to turn on the lights and to come clean. And the answer is not much more time," Powell said.

Britain has already sent troops to the Gulf to join US forces there, diverging from European partners Germany and France and other international heavyweights such as Russia and China.

German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and French President Jacques Chirac, whose opinions have drawn fire from US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld, said the arms inspectors needed more time.

"We are of the opinion... that the inspectors will get more time for their work," Schroeder told journalists in Berlin.

At a later news conference after meeting Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Schroeder said: "We are both of the opinion that nobody has the right to undertake any kind of action without a decision of the Security Council."

Chirac, who discussed the issue with Schroeder by phone, echoed his call and urged Baghdad to give the inspectors "full and entire cooperation".

Germany's Joschka Fischer, also attending the EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels, said: "War is no alternative. I think one can conclude that the inspectors are doing a great job which should definitely go on."

The EU meeting produced a statement seeking more time for the inspectors in what officials said was a "unified position". Diplomats said the declaration papered over cracks that would inevitably emerge if Washington went to war.

Russia says new resolution not needed

In Moscow, Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Yuri Fedotov said the reports of the arms inspectors were only intended to provide a preliminary survey of their work and set basic outlines for the future.

"At the present time, there is no need to adopt new (UN) resolutions on Iraq," he was quoted by Itar-Tass news agency as saying.

The Arab League's Amr Moussa said in an interview with Reuters in Berlin that the arms inspectors should get as much time as they needed, three months or more if necessary, to check for banned weaponry.

"There should be no outer limit for peace. War is a very serious and dangerous proposition, you have to avoid it by all means up until it is the only necessity and one the whole world community decides.

"So if they need more time, they should be given more time. Why should we be in a hurry to wage war?" he asked on the eve of talks with the German foreign minister.

Prime Minister Abdullah Gul of Turkey, a close NATO ally of the United States and a key to any war with Iraq, said conflict with Baghdad could spell economic and human disaster and called for increased efforts to avert it.

In New Delhi, Iranian Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi urged Baghdad to cooperate fully with the weapons inspectors, but said all countries bordering Iraq opposed a US-led invasion.

www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.27.03, 2:07 PM ET

UNITED NATIONS - Chief U.N. arms inspector Hans Blix sharply criticized Iraq for not giving enough evidence on its past weapons of mass destruction programs but did not corroborate U.S. claims that Baghdad had rebuilt its arsenal. Blix was addressing the U.N. Security Council after two months of inspections, outlining in detail gaps in information Iraq should have delivered in a 12,000-page arms declaration on Dec. 7. But he said the omissions could not lead him to conclude that Baghdad possesed prohibited arms.

UNITED NATIONS - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said that two months of weapons inspections in Iraq had not proved Baghdad had tried to revive its nuclear arms programme. In an indirect jab at the United States' impatience with the inspection process and threats of war against Baghdad, top nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei also called the inspection process a valuable investment in the interest of peace.

WASHINGTON - Iraq is not cooperating with U.N. weapons inspectors or complying with a U.N. resolution demanding it disarm and it is time for the Security Council to weigh how to respond, a senior U.S. State Department official said.

BAGHDAD - Ordinary Iraqis saw the report by top U.N. weapons inspectors to the Security Council as negative and predicted Washington would use it as a cover for invading the oil-rich country.

DAMASCUS - Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in some Arab capitals to protest against a possible U.S. war on Iraq, labelling U.S. President George W. Bush a "butcher" and his administration "arrogant".

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party kept its commanding lead in final opinion polls published on the eve of Israel's general election, but looked set to struggle to form a stable coalition.

SEOUL - A South Korean presidential envoy held talks with North Korean officials in Pyongyang in an attempt to ease the crisis over the Stalinist state's nuclear ambitions.

CARACAS - Venezuela's opposition debated scaling back its strike against leftist President Hugo Chavez to ease the burden on a struggling private sector now also threatened by government currency curbs and price controls.

LONDON/SEOUL - "SQL Slammer", a two-day-old computer worm that wreaked havoc on the Internet over the weekend, appeared to slow to a crawl late on Monday, fizzling out as quickly as it emerged.

ABIDJAN - Gangs of youths, some swinging machetes, blocked streets in Ivory Coast's main city and pulled foreigners from cars in a third day of protests at a peace deal they say was imposed by former colonial power France.

THE HAGUE - Former Serbian President Milan Milutinovic pleaded not guilty to crimes against humanity during the 1999 Kosovo conflict as he made his first court appearance since surrendering to the Hague tribunal.

PARIS - Jean-Claude Trichet, the would-be president of the European Central Bank, testified for the first time in a financial scandal trial that could rule the 60-year-old Frenchman out of the top job at the ECB.

Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service

www.forbes.com Reuters, 01.27.03, 9:01 AM ET

UNITED NATIONS - As U.N. arms inspectors prepared to give the Security Council a crucial report on Iraq, U.S. and British officials said they had the proof Baghdad was hiding banned weapons, laying it open to attack. Hours before the Council session in New York, due to start at 10:30 a.m. (1530 GMT), the United States made clear it would go into battle alone against Baghdad if it could not muster support among a deeply divided international community. BAGHDAD - Iraq said it was up to Washington and London to avoid a military showdown and accused U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell of lying when he charged Baghdad with developing banned weapons. DAMASCUS - Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in some Arab capitals to protest against a possible U.S. war on Iraq, labelling U.S. President George W. Bush a "butcher" and his administration "arrogant".

SEOUL - A South Korean presidential envoy held talks with North Korean officials in Pyongyang in an attempt to ease the crisis over the Stalinist state's nuclear ambitions.

JERUSALEM - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's right-wing Likud party kept its commanding lead in final opinion polls published on the eve of Israel's general election, but looked set to struggle to form a stable coalition.

ABIDJAN - Gangs of youths, some swinging machetes, blocked streets in Ivory Coast's main city and pulled foreigners from cars in a third day of protests at a peace deal they say was imposed by former colonial power France.

LONDON - War fears sent stocks and the dollar tumbling and propelled gold to its highest level in six years as markets across the world fretted ahead of a key U.N weapons report on Iraq.

TEHRAN - Iran's top security body has decided to free the country's foremost clerical dissident from house arrest following fears over his health, a government source said.

BRUSSELS - Sweden said France should not invite Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe to a summit in Paris next month because it would contravene the European Union's sanctions against his regime.

LONDON/SEOUL - A resilient two-day-old computer worm continued to hobble the Internet, infesting computer networks in Europe, Asia and America and stoking fears it will slow data transmissions for a few more days.

CARACAS, Venezuela/PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil - Foes of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez clamored for early elections to vote him out of office, while the former coup plotter hinted he might be forced to take up arms again if his leftist "revolution" was defeated.

www.theledger.com The Associated Press

The top business news from The Associated Press for the morning of Monday, January 27, 2003:

Worm Attack Exposes Inadequate Security NEW YORK (AP) - This weekend's Internet attack has security experts worried that too many system managers are only fixing problems as they occur, rather than keeping their defenses up to date. The worm that crippled tens of thousands of computers worldwide, congested the network for countless others and even disabled Bank of America cash machines took advantage of a vulnerability in some Microsoft Corp. software that had been discovered in July.

Venezuela Leader Warns of Price Controls CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) - President Hugo Chavez said he would implement price controls to go along with limits on the trade in foreign currencies as Venezuela's economy heads for a tailspin stemming from an opposition strike, which entered its ninth week Monday. "So that these (currency) controls do not hurt the poor, we will institute price controls," Chavez said Sunday in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the World Social Forum. He did not give details of the controls.

Retailers Form Digital Music Venture LOS ANGELES (AP) - Six retail record store chains - hurting from competition from CD burning, online music and large discount stores - are teaming to offer consumers digital music downloads in their stores and over the Internet. The stores have formed a joint venture called Echo that will provide technology and allow them to offer individual tracks for downloading to portable devices and computers.

Progress Reported on Cheaper AIDS Drugs DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) - Global business leaders reported progress on making cheaper AIDS drugs available to poor nations as Microsoft founder Bill Gates made another contribution to health in the developing world - announcing a $200 million grant to fund medical research. Meeting at an exclusive Alpine resort, delegates to the World Economic Forum held talks on how to ensure access for poor countries to affordable copies of vital drugs while respecting the patent rights of pharmaceutical companies.

Super Bowl Advertisers Stick With Humor NEW YORK (AP) - Advertising's auteurs kept it quirky on Super Bowl Sunday, with humor a prime ingredient in most commercials as Americans weary of war talk and a gloomy economy were given a chance to chuckle. Brokerage Charles Schwab noted the fear of Wall Street's three years of declines, offering a man sprinting through his neighborhood, pursued by an unseen foe. The man is finally cornered in a backyard by the mail carrier - delivering a brokerage statement.

Suit Accuses Philip Morris of Deception EDWARDSVILLE, Ill. (AP) - Sharon Price switched from smoking regular cigarettes to brands labeled "light" when she was pregnant in the 1970s. "I knew the better choice was to quit, but I thought I was reducing my risk," the pack-a-day smoker said.

Questions Surround the Future of Fiat ROME (AP) - Watching Giovanni Agnelli's health became a macabre stock market hobby in recent months: When his life prognosis dimmed, Fiat stock rose. Traders heaped pressure on the Fiat empire overseen by Agnelli to get out of its losing car business. But the ailing Agnelli didn't pull out.

Gold Prices LONDON (AP) - Gold bullion opened Monday at a bid price of $372.50 an ounce, up from $366.30 late Friday.

Japan Markets TOKYO (AP) - The Nikkei Stock Average fell 122.18 points to close at 8,609.47 on Monday.

Dollar-Yen TOKYO (AP) - The dollar traded at 117.82 yen on Monday, down 0.03 yen from Friday.

Last modified: January 27. 2003 3:54AM

www.guardian.co.uk Comment

Geoffrey Wheatcroft Monday January 27, 2003 The Guardian

Next month, Lord Black of Crossharbour - Conrad Black, the owner of the Daily Telegraph - is giving a lecture in London entitled "Is it in Britain's national interest to be America's principal ally?" There may be no prizes for guessing his answer, but that is indeed a very interesting question, and has been for many years. The closer one looks at the relations between the two countries in terms of national interest, the more unequal they seem, though distorted by a misreading of history and a misunderstanding of motives.

A hundred years ago, England was the only global superpower, whose territories covered much of the Earth's surface, and whose City of London owned much more of the world than the British empire formally controlled. That included the US, which was to a large extent a financial (as well as a cultural) dependency of London until the first world war. This was much resented by an American nation which had, after all, emerged from rebellion against British rule, and one episode after another showed that whatever affection the English felt for the Americans was simply not reciprocated.

After the US civil war there was a fierce dispute about the Alabama, an English-built Confederate warship which had inflicted damage on Union shipping. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts demanded a sum amounting to six times British annual state spending (he was prepared to consider the cession of Canada as an alternative) before London paid a sum equivalent, in relation to state spending, to £150bn today. This set a pattern for American aggression and British conciliation which was repeated in 1895 when the two countries almost went to war over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. President Cleveland played on a deep vein of American Anglophobia, showing that, as one historian put it: "An Anglo-American war would still be the most popular of all wars in America".

In the 20th century, the two countries twice became wartime allies, but this quite wrongly led the British to suppose that they had identical interests. For one thing, the Americans entered both world wars belatedly, at very little cost in casualties, and very much on their own terms. That was especially true in the second world war, one of whose outcomes was the end of Great Britain as a great power, at the behest - and to the considerable advantage - of the US.

Only in this strange age of historical amnesia could a senior White House official tell the Washington Post that the US now faces the same responsibilities as when it was "standing between Nazi Germany and a takeover of all Europe". And with his own frightening historical ignorance, Tony Blair has spoken of our duty to support the Americans as they supported us during the Blitz. He is apparently unaware that, far from supporting or standing between anyone, America was neutral at the time. The US didn't enter the war until December 1941, and then only because Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler had declared war on the US, not the other way round.

Before the US joined the war, there was, of course, the Lend-Lease agreement, which was represented as an act of generosity. The reality was that, in return for some obsolescent warships, Washington ruthlessly stripped British dollar reserves. The process was completed by the terms of the postwar American loan whose effect - combined with Lend-Lease - was gravely to weaken the British economy, especially the exporting economy, to the very great benefit of American business. Any remaining illusions about a coincidence of British and American interests should never have survived the Suez episode, when London had the financial rug pulled from under its feet by Washington.

To say all of which may sound "anti-American", that quaint catch-all term. In fact, one can perfectly well like and admire much about America while discussing its political conduct objectively. And there is anyway no reason why the US shouldn't ruthlessly pursue its national interests as it sees them. But that only emphasises the sheer one-sidedness of the Anglo-American relationship, going far beyond the inevitable inequality between a former global power, now living in reduced circumstances, and the superpower which succeeded it.

This can be illustrated in the words of two Victorian prime ministers. When a pompous colleague said, "I shall always support you when you are in the right," Melbourne less pompously replied, "What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong."

Palmerston said that England had no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. His phrase is sometimes quoted today by those who direct the Bush administration, inside or outside the White House, and it is a perfectly plausible basis for any country's foreign policy.

The trouble is that America follows Palmerston, while expecting the British to follow Melbourne. They have no permanent friends: we must always support them. More surprisingly, this is accepted by some of our own official class, through what Hugo Young has called "the convenient rationale, now much heard in Whitehall, that Britain has a selfless duty to act alongside the US in its military ventures precisely in order to show the world that Washington is not alone". It is hard to see how that is either convenient or rational. "My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but "your country right or wrong" is barely sane.

Never has the relationship been more one-sided than it is today. Blair loyally acts as the frontman for George Bush, putting the case for war against Iraq with a fluency the president can't match, even if it means telling what would be called, in a person of less exalted station, plain lies about Saddam Hussein's military threat to this country and his connections with al-Qaida. As for Blair's claim that, in return for our loyalty, we enjoy unique influence in Washington, there is no more evidence of that than there is for an Iraqi connection with September 11.

Washington conspicuously did not support us in the years when we tried to defeat the IRA. Blair's devoted loyalty the autumn before last was shortly rewarded by a US tariff designed to destroy what's left of the British steel industry. And if the prime minister really enjoyed the influence he claims, then Washington would have backed his pet scheme for an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference, at least to the extent of telling Sharon to let the Palestinians come to London. Nothing of the kind happened.

The sad truth is that Tony Blair is the last victim of an illusion which has long bedevilled British policy, the myth of the "special relationship". Actually, the chief characteristic of this relationship was that only one side knew it existed - and relationships don't come more special than that.

wheaty@compuserve.com