US: President Bush is likely to face a hostile United Nations General Assembly next week, with most of the world lined up against US policy on Iraq, following the failure of the five senior members of the UN Security Council to reach agreement in Geneva on Saturday on a new resolution.
The 15-member UN Security Council will meet this week in New York to continue discussions on the draft US resolution which envisages internationalising the situation in Iraq, but diplomats are pessimistic.
With the cost of Iraq in financial and human terms spiralling upwards and domestic criticism of Iraq policy rising sharply, the Bush administration is offering to create a multinational force, under American command, and to mandate the interim Iraqi Governing Council to write a constitution and set a timetable for new elections.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in Geneva that consensus among the five powers on the future of Iraq was "essential and achievable".
However, a bitter diplomatic chasm reminiscent of pre-Iraq war days at the UN has reopened between Washington and Paris over French insistence that civilian control be handed over to Iraqis more quickly than the Americans are prepared to consider.
"There is not yet a functioning government that you can turn authority over to, and the last thing we want to do is to set up the Iraqis to fail," US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday in Baghdad.
"We want to turn the government over from us to the Iraqi people, but with an Iraqi leadership that has been elected by the people, not just a group of individuals who have been appointed," he told CNN.
He dismissed as "totally unrealistic" the French timetable, which envisages ceding executive power in a month and holding elections for an Iraqi government within six months.
The resolution Mr Bush now seeks would help shift the peacekeeping burden from Washington and create a multinational force under a unified UN command with an American commander. Amid signs that the US military is badly overstretched - with back-to-back combat tours being considered for the first time since Vietnam - the Bush administration seems resigned to bearing the cost of post-war Iraq virtually alone.
US Vice-President Mr Dick Cheney acknowledged yesterday that it would seek more than the $87 billion already requested from Congress to pay for military and reconstruction costs in Iraq. The cost would be far higher "if we don't finish the job right here", he said on NBC.
Mr Cheney insisted that evidence would be found to back up the claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the main reason Americans were given for going to war.
He said that the task of Mr David Kay, the chief US official looking for WMD, "is to look for the people that were involved in the programme, to find documentary evidence to back it up, to find physical evidence when he can find that. It's a hard task, but I've got great confidence that he can do this". As a TV commentator before the war, Mr Kay, a former UN weapons inspector, was adamant that WMD existed in Iraq.
Mr Cheney said he misspoke when he declared just before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam "has in fact reconstituted nuclear weapons . . . I said consistently 'nuclear weapons capability'," he said. He also said he didn't know whether Saddam was involved in the September 11th attacks. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe he was.
US Defence Secretary Mr Donald Rumsfeld said that if the UN resolution went through, the US could expect anything between zero and 30,000 troops to supplement the US-dominated coalition forces in Iraq.
A US soldier was killed and three others were injured when a roadside bomb exploded next to their convoy in Iraq yesterday.
It happened in the troubled city of Fallujah where an American patrol mistakenly killed at least eight Iraqi policemen and a Jordanian guard on Friday.
During funeral ceremonies for the slain men on Saturday, angry protesters fired weapons and called for violence against the US occupation to protest at one of the most serious friendly fire incidents of the Iraq war. The death of the US soldier yesterday brought to 155 the number of American troops to die in Iraq since Mr Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1st.