The United States sought to tighten the noose around Iraq, ordering two more carrier groups to the Gulf, but Baghdad hit back Wednesday, accusing Washington of trying to sabotage the UN disarmament process.
With chief inspectors set to demand more time to complete the weapons checks when they make a key progress report to the UN Security Council on Monday, US President George W. Bush launched a pre-emptive strike.
"How much time do we need to see clearly that he's not disarming?" Bush snapped, charging Saddam with using "the tricks of the past" to thwart UN inspectors as he did after the 1991 Gulf War.
"He is delaying. He's deceiving. He's asking for time. He's playing hide-and-seek with inspectors," said Bush. "This looks like a re-run of a bad movie. And I'm not interested in watching it."
Bush was speaking less than a week before the first progress report on Iraq on January 27 - a date described by Washington as probably signalling the "final phase" of the stand-off.
However, as arms experts carried out a 54th day of inspections in Iraq, a leading state-run newspaper said Bush was out to stop them certifying that the country is free of banned weapons.
"The whole world knows that the declarations of the US president toward Iraq are false and even Bush himself knows it," said Babel, run by President Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday.
"If the US administration cannot present proof, it should shut up and let the inspectors carry on their mission in all transparency and without pressure or blackmail, so that they can report to the Security Council that they have not found weapons of mass destruction."
Iraqi presidential adviser General Amer Al-Saadi, the frontman defending Baghdad's arms dossier, disclosed he had been approached by Washington and London with proposals that he defect.
"I have been approached when I was on business trips abroad," Al-Saadi told a US television network. "I was alone in a breakfast room in a hotel."
Asked whether he had given any consideration to the offer al-Saadi replied: "No. Why?"
Germany meanwhile refused Tuesday to add its voice to any UN vote for the use of force against Iraq as France, Russia and China backed more time for UN disarmament inspectors to fulfill their mandate.
A UN panel monitoring sanctions against Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network also said Tuesday it had no evidence of links between the terrorist group and Iraq that Washington and London have alleged exist.
Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's comments that Germany would not vote for force was Berlin's first such categorical refusal.
"Don't expect Germany to approve a resolution which would give legitimacy to war," the German leader said, without making it clear if Berlin would vote against or abstain.
Germany is currently one of the 10 rotating members of the Security Council with no veto. It is due to take over the chair of the Council for a month on February 1.
And in a blow to Washington's attempts to forge a "coalition of the willing" in support of military action, Russia aligned itself with fellow permanent Security Council members France and China by opposing immediate conflict against Iraq.
Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said a majority of the five permanent council members, all of whom have veto power, now believed it was "indispensable" to pursue diplomatic efforts well beyond next Monday's report.
He also warned Washington against taking unilateral military action without explicit Security Council authorisation, saying this would "not only complicate the situation in the region but weaken the anti-terror coalition."
On Monday, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin declared "nothing would justify" such an attack and suggested France could resort to a veto in the Security council.
His Chinese counterpart Tang Jiaxuan said the report should be seen as a "new beginning," not the end of the process.
However Bush and other US leaders have made it clear the United States is prepared to circumvent the UN and take military action "with like-minded nations." Britain is also pouring troops and ships into the Gulf region.
Adding muscle to US rhetoric, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld signed deployment orders for the two additional carrier battle groups at the weekend.
With that order, the US Navy will soon have five aircraft carriers in or bound for the Gulf, giving US commanders the clout to launch a massive air offensive against Iraq, analysts said.
The United States is expected to have more than 150,000 troops in the region by mid-February.
Australia announced that a first military contingent would leave for the Gulf on Thursday, despite strong political and public opposition to involvement in a US-led war in Iraq.
The deployment, codenamed "Operation Bastille", will comprise a Sea King helicopter, an army landing craft, an army air defence detachment and a specialist explosives ordnance disposal team.
And the British submarine Splendid has left Scotland ahead of possible conflict.
Blair blasts Britons over Iraq war