A defiant Iraq threatened to unleash suicide attacks against US nationals in the Middle East and to wipe out any invading force should the Washington wage a new war against it.

The warnings by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan were made public Saturday -- the day after US President George W. Bush met his close ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and declared that a likely conflict was "weeks, not months" away.

"Martyrs, perpetrators of suicide attacks, are our new weapons and they will not only take action in Iraq," Ramadan told Monday's edition of the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel.

"The whole region will be set ablaze. This part of the world will become a sea of resistance and danger for Americans.

"It will be much worse for them than anything that has happened so far, especially in places where US soldiers are stationed, meaning in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait," Ramadan said.

Official newspapers in Baghdad on Saturday quoted Saddam telling senior military aides that if war happens, "the enemy will not enter Baghdad's suburbs because he will die. Even if they send a million soldiers, our boys will kill them."

The Iraqi warnings followed a meeting between Blair and Bush in Washington Friday after which the British prime minister said "time is running out" for Saddam.

Both the United States and Britain hope to persuade other members of the UN Security Council to adopt a new resolution backing military action against Iraq.

But Bush said that while he would welcome a new UN mandate, "any attempt to drag the process on for months will be resisted by the United States".

He insisted that a resolution on disarmament adopted November 8 last year "gives us the authority to move without any second resolution."

The United States, Britain and Australia have deployed a massive land, sea and air force to the Gulf region that will count more than 150,000 service personnel, several aircraft carriers and hundreds of warplanes by midFebruary.

More than 100 US and British special forces also flew in from Jordan on a six-day covert mission in western Iraq to identify key targets in the event of a war, Britain's Daily Telegraph reported Saturday, quoting defence sources.

Meanwhile, chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix has challenged US charges that Iraq is flouting international demands to disarm, saying in an interview released Friday that the UN teams had found nothing to justify a war.

Blix took issue with much of the case being pushed by the US administration, which is moving toward a likely conflict with Iraq and its leader Saddam Hussein, the New York Times reported.

He acknowledged that "diplomacy needs to be backed by force sometimes and inspections need to be backed by pressure" but spoke out against war.

"I think it would be terrible if this comes to an end by armed force and I wish for this process of disarmament through the peaceful avenue of inspections," Blix said.