Gulf yawns between Iraq camps

Blair: trying to shore up support for the US position

By William Horsley BBC world affairs correspondent

US President George W Bush will in a few hours' time hold talks at his Camp David retreat with the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

The two leaders want to agree a joint strategy for enforcing the United Nations resolution on removing any weapons of mass destruction from Iraq.

Chirac: sceptical

Meanwhile France, one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, is at the centre of ongoing efforts to rally opposition to military action against Iraq among other countries in Europe and further afield.

Senior French officials have told the BBC that their government is still doing all it can to block the path to a possible war over Iraq.

The French, with a small group of other Nato members, are standing in the way of America's wish for precautionary deployments to defend an alliance member, Turkey, with interceptor missiles and extra reconnaissance flights.

And press reports say President Chirac has made a series of telephone calls to urge European and other world leaders to oppose war, and oppose a new United Nations resolution which might authorise it.

Testing times

President Bush was pleased with the show of support for his stance by eight leaders from west and east Europe in a joint newspaper article printed on Thursday.

Political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic acknowledge that all this is a severe test of US-Europe relations.

The United States, angered by Germany's open opposition to its Iraq strategy, has disrupted plans for the UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix to go to Berlin for talks next Wednesday.

Newspapers reflect the political clash

Instead, the US has called a meeting of the Security Council for that day so that the Secretary of State Colin Powell can present previously secret evidence to back up the claim that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction that pose a threat to world peace.

American leaders have made clear they already think there is no turning back from using military force. But for virtually all other countries, further proof of Iraq's illegal weapons programme is vitally important.

Media gap

The political confrontation between the hawks and doves over Iraq in the western alliance is mirrored by the way the issue of war and peace is portrayed in the various national media.

In France and Germany television coverage of the crisis is overwhelmingly anti-war.

In the United States the media are open to the charge that they give little space to those who criticise the government's policy on Iraq and the Middle East.

This information gap is fuelling unusual tensions in transatlantic relations.