The United States and Britain have accused the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of "obvious falsehood" and omissions in his weapons declaration to the United Nations.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said President George W Bush was "concerned" about gaps in the Iraqi report, although he would not specify whether the US regarded these as a breach of the UN resolution on Iraq.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said that Washington will make a statement on the dossier on Thursday, after the chief UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, gives his first assessment of the 12,000-page document.
He added that he was not optimistic that Iraq would co-operate with demands to disarm, and that he believed other Security Council members felt the same way.
Mr Fleischer said the US would act in a "thoughtful and deliberative" way after hearing Mr Blix's report. "But this was Saddam Hussein's last chance," he added.
UK Foreign Secretary Jack Straw also criticised the Iraqi declaration, saying it was not "the full and complete" version demanded by the UN Security Council.
"This will fool nobody," Mr Straw said in a statement on Wednesday. "If Saddam persists in this obvious falsehood, it will become clear that he has rejected the pathway to peace."
Mr Bush is meeting security officials in Washington to consider a formal response to the 12,000 page Iraqi declaration.
The US is expected to declare the report inadequate, but correspondents say Mr Bush is unlikely to cite this as a "material breach" of the resolution and therefore a justification for war.
Instead, Mr Bush is expected to chart a slightly more patient course that would push the prospects for military action back to mid-January.
'Obvious omissions'
Britain has been the strongest international supporter of President Bush's tough line on Iraq — and the latest statement keeps Britain's position closely aligned with that of the US.
Mr Straw said the declaration had "obvious omissions" — notably a failure to account for the weapons of mass destruction listed in the final report of the UN inspectors who left Iraq in 1998.
Prime Minister Tony Blair said on Wednesday that Britain would give its formal response to the declaration after Christmas.
"I think most people who have looked at this obviously very long document are very sceptical about the claims that it makes," he said.
Grounds for war
Correspondents say the US administration is likely to press for interviews with Iraqi scientists outside Iraq — an option laid out in the UN resolution.
The Bush administration believes Iraq will resist the move, and can then be declared in material breach of the resolution.
Mr Blix reportedly met US State Department official John S Wolf on Tuesday, who put to him the deficiencies that US security agencies had found in the declaration.
The edited declaration distributed to the non-permanent members of the UN Security Council runs to 3,500 pages, compared with the original's 12,000 pages.
Sensitive information — which the US says could be used to build weapons of mass destruction — was removed from it.
Syria in particular has been angered by the censorship of the document, and on Wednesday said it would return its copy in protest at not receiving the full version.
The Security Council resolution which led to the return of weapons inspectors to Iraq, adopted in November, warns Baghdad of "serious consequences" if it fails to comply with UN disarmament demands.
The Americans have said they will lead a coalition to disarm Iraq by force if it fails to co-operate fully with weapons inspections.
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