Straw and Powell try to urge unwilling majority into action

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, told the United Nations Security Council the weapons inspectors were having to operate in the face of "Iraq's failure fully and actively to comply with resolution 1441".

He added: "I hope and believe that a peaceful resolution to this crisis may still be possible, but this will require a dramatic and immediate change by Saddam [Hussein]. This will only be achieved if we in the Security Council hold our nerve in the face of this tyrant."

The US Secretary of State, Colin Powell, confronted his reluctant allies and urged them to threaten force if Iraq does not disarm.

He said the world should not be taken in by "tricks that are being played on us".

General Powell added: "The threat of force must remain.... We cannot wait for one of these terrible weapons to turn up in our cities. More inspections – I am sorry – are not the answer.

"What we need is immediate, active, full co-operation on the part of Iraq. What we need is for Iraq to disarm."

He denounced recent signs of co-operating from Iraq as "continued efforts to deceive, to deny, to divert, to throw us off the trail, to throw us off the path".

"We cannot allow this process to be endlessly strung out as Iraq is trying to right now.... My friends, they cannot be allowed to get away with it again."

But the US Secretary of State ran into stiff resistance. France called for extended inspections and another report from inspectors on 14 March, and several other nations on the council supported that proposal. The French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, said: "The use of force against Iraq is not justified today; there is an alternative to war, and that is to disarm Iraq through inspections....

"Let us give the UN weapons inspectors time. A premature recourse to the military option would have heavy consequences.

"No one can assert today that the path of war will be shorter than that of the inspections. No one can claim either that it might lead to a safer, more just and more stable world, for war is always the sanction of failure."

His remarks were greeted with applause like those of the Russian Foreign Minister, Igor Ivanov, who stressed: "The inspectors must continue their inspections.... Force can be resorted to, but only when all other remedies have been exhausted. We have not yet reached that point.

"There is movement, movement in the right direction, and we cannot ignore that," he told the Security Council, adding that the will of the majority of the world was behind the inspectors.

Standing firmly with Russia and France, the Chinese Foreign Minister, Tang Jiaxuan, said: "China believes the inspection process is working and that inspectors should continue to be given the time they need....

"Only when we go along the line of political settlement can we truly live up to the trust and hope the international community places in the Security Council."

The Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Tariq Aziz, did not immediately comment on the latest reports from UN inspectors.

But he said the US government's claim that Baghdad supports fundamentalist terrorists or could supply them with weapons was a "bad American movie".

"First of all Iraq doesn't have weapons of mass destruction," the Iraqi said. "Iraq doesn't have any relationship with any terrorist, fundamentalist group," Mr Aziz added, accusing Washington of harbouring an "imperialist objective" to "colonise" Iraq.

He cautioned "Christian" European nations against supporting Washington in any war against Iraq. "It would be interpreted in the Arab world as a crusade against Arabs and Muslims," Mr Aziz said.