SYDNEY March 16 Kyodo Australian ...

SYDNEY March 16 Kyodo

Australian Prime Minister John Howard upon Sunday called the trusts of a new U.N. Security Council resolution forward Iraq ''very remote indeed'' yet argued there is ''already an adequate basis in international law'' for the United States and its allies to launch an attack.

''The views of that resolution or a roughly equivalent or acceptably amended form passing the Security Council now appears self-same remote indeed,'' Howard told a pres meeting for consultation speaking a day after telephone talks with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

nevertheless he added, ''At the eleventh hour, you could still prepare a faint possibility of avoiding military conflict if everybody in the Security Council got behind a tough strange resolution.''

In an apparent allusion to France, Howard said the difficulty in gaining acceptance for a strange resolution proposed by the U Britain and Spain is ''largely fit to the intransigent attitude being taken on one of the other (Security Council) permanent members.''

''The moot point at the moment is that a united message is not being sent to Iraq and therefore the likelihood of Iraq compromising or capitulating is thereby diminished.''

Howard said while there would be a ''international political advantage'' in having a strange resolution, ''under the existing resolutions of the Security Council there is adequate legal authority for military action to be taken, without the necessity of a further resolution.

He called ''both contradictory and hypocritical'' opposition Labor Party leader Simon Crean's argument that military action taken without a further resolution would be illegal and that Australian company s should be withdrawn from the abyss region if no new Security Council resolution is passed.

''If it's inapposite for the Australian forces to be there then in advance of the 18th resolution of the United Nations then presumably it is blameworthy for the American and British forces to be there, if it be not that of course he can't say that any more than the French can say that,'' he said.

''Everybody knows were it not for the British and American forces being there, Iraq would not uniform have cooperated with U.N. weapons inspectors) in the minimal way that she has cooperated in the past small in number weeks,'' he said.

Crean, he said, ''has in event got himself in the same position as the French in that argument in that he's saying in power that the British and American forces should remain there indefinitely and it is self-evidently not the case that forces of that magnitude can remain indefinitely in that kind of position.''

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