War looms closer as Bush tells forces: 'We are ready'  

As the Pentagon ordered crack Marine units to the Gulf yesterday, President Bush warned Saddam Hussein that unless he disarmed voluntarily America would act "deliberately and decisively" to do the job by force.

In an address to troops at Fort Hood in Texas – the largest military base in the US, which is likely to supply thousands of people for any war against Iraq – Mr Bush again held the door ajar for a peaceful resolution to the crisis.

Though war is seen by many Americans as inevitable, Mr Bush declared that "even now, President Hussein could end his defiance, and dramatically change direction" by telling the truth about his suspected chemical biological and nuclear programmes. The Iraqi leader "knows what he must do to avoid conflict, and we would certainly prefer voluntary compliance".

But although he again described force as a last option, nothing Mr Bush said suggested military conflict – possibly as soon as next month – could be avoided. "We are ready," he declared. The Iraqi regime was a "great threat" with a record of "reckless aggression" and a demonstrated readiness to use weapons of mass destruction against other countries and its own people.

In 1998, the departing UN inspectors concluded that Baghdad had failed to account for substantial stockpiles of chemical and biological arms and did so again in the 12,000-page weapons declaration it submitted to the UN last month, Mr Bush said. Washington has already deemed those omissions a "material breach" of Iraq's obligations to the UN – the accepted trigger phrase for military action.

Shortly before Mr Bush spoke, the Pentagon stepped up its preparations for war by ordering units of the 45,000-strong 1st Marine Expeditionary Force to deploy from California to the Gulf, as well as 800 army engineering and intelligence specialists and about 300 air defence troops.

The new deployments will take place in the next few weeks. They follow the go-ahead just before Christmas from Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, for a doubling of US troop strength around Iraq from 50,000 to 100,000 men. But claims by American officials that neighbouring countries would throw their full weight behind the US received a new setback when Turkey warned that its public opposed a war. Yasar Yakis, Ankara's Foreign Minister, signalled that his government would resist requests from Washington to base large numbers of American troops on Turkish soil for a possible invasion of Iraq.

Mr Bush drew a clear distinction between the need for a diplomatic solution in the crisis over North Korea – in which "the world must speak with one voice" to persuade Pyongyang to give up its secret nuclear programmes – and the crisis in Iraq where, in Mr Bush's words, "the world has already spoken with one voice". It was now up to President Saddam to comply with resolution 1441, passed unanimously in November by the UN Security Council, or face the consequences, he said.

But that unanimity was not visible on the streets of the main cities in Pakistan yesterday, where thousands of demonstrators marched in protest against any war to topple the leader of a fellow Islamic country. The unrest prompted even tighter security around the US embassy in Islamabad and other sensitive sites. In Peshawar, western Pakistan, about 7,000 people gathered outside the Madni mosque -- the largest in the city – chanting "Down with America" and "Long Live Saddam Hussein".

In Multan, some 1,500 demonstrators gathered, some burning an effigy of President Bush and chanting slogans against the Pakistani President, General Pervez Musharraf. Salim Chohan, a local cleric, said: "We will destroy America if it attacks Iraq". Another cleric, Qari Abdul Ghafoor, accused General Musharraf of being "an agent of Jews and America".