By Ed Johnson

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Monday that the prospect of war against Iraq has ebbed but that if conflict becomes unavoidable Britain would prefer a second U.N. resolution authorizing military action. While neither remark appeared to signal a change in Britain's firm support for U.S. policy, it came against a background of fresh U.S. deployments including a hospital ship, and British news reports suggesting that the countdown to conflict had begun.

Asked to comment on a statement that the odds of war with Iraq had slipped from 60-40 to 40-60, Straw told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that "I think that is a reasonably accurate description." Straw said nothing specific had happened to make him shift his estimate of the chances of war, but said he was trying quell the notion in many newspaper reports that war was unavoidable. Ellie Goldsworthy, head of the U.K. armed forces program at the Royal United Services Institute for Defense Studies, said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein would have no incentive to cooperate with weapons inspectors if a U.S.-led attack was inevitable.

"Britain and America want the threat of military action to be credible but not inevitable and want Saddam to think he can still do something about it. They do not want him to start concentrating on defense strategies," Goldsworthy added. Straw repeated his government's position that Britain would prefer a second U.N. resolution authorizing military action against Saddam, if inspectors found he had weapons of mass destruction. "We have always made it clear, explicitly, our preference for a second resolution if we think that military action was necessary and justified," Straw said. "I believe that it also the position of the United States."

Prime Minister Tony Blair's government has said since November that Britain would prefer a second resolution before taking military action, but has said it could join the United States in war without one. The United States -- backed by Britain -- has threatened to use force to disarm Iraq if it does not voluntarily give up chemical and biological weapons as required by U.N. Security Council resolutions. Iraq maintains it has no banned weapons.

Some European allies have said they would not support a war without a second U.N. resolution. "There has to be a clear decision in the U.N. for such a serious and wide-reaching action," Norwegian Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik said on Monday. French Foreign Ministry spokesman Francois Rivasseau said "we continue to believe that war is not inevitable."

"We must continue on the path that started with the adoption of Resolution 1441, that of the disarmament of Iraq" by U.N weapons inspectors, he told reporters. A second resolution would be a dilemma for Germany, which takes a non-permanent seat on the Security Council this year. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said his country would not participate in a military campaign, but he has sidestepped questions about supporting a further resolution authorizing force.

In a speech to British ambassadors from around the world Monday -- the first ever such gathering -- Straw said that terrorists and rogue states like Iraq and North Korea were part of the "same picture." He said Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network "would stop at nothing to inflict mass slaughter" and would use weapons of mass destruction if it could acquire them.

"The most likely sources of technology and know-how for such terrorist organizations are rogue regimes which continue to flaunt their obligations under international law not to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons," he said. "North Korea typifies the unpredictable nature of the threats we face over the next decade," Straw added.

The two-day meeting of 150 ambassadors was not a specific response to the Iraq crisis, a Foreign Office spokesman said on condition of anonymity.

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