The United States has bowed to world opinion and offered a compromise Security Council resolution that does not call for the automatic use of military force against Iraq, while insisting it still could attack Baghdad without UN approval.Jordan's King Abdullah II, however, warned on Saturday that a US military strike on Iraq could weaken international efforts to combat terrorism.

The new US position would permit the council to consider authorizing the use of force if chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix determined that Iraq was not complying with the terms of UN resolutions, US officials said.

The Security Council session broke for the weekend late Friday and action on the US proposal was seen here as unlikely until next week.

US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Blix should report back to the Security Council which should then "deal with the problem."

"Our preference is for the Security Council to take action if Iraq doesn't comply," he told reporters.

"If they deal effectively with the problem, with the collective action, with military action or something, so much the better," Boucher said.

"If they don't, as we've stated in the congressional resolution and elsewhere, the president still has his authority. We're going to deal with the problem one way or the other," he said.

The probable resolution to be tabled by the United States would enable arms inspectors to assess whether Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction, backed by only an implicit threat of force, diplomats said.

It would set in place a two-stage process, reconvening the Security Council before any military attack on Iraq took place, they added.

French President Jacques Chirac said on Friday he believed progress had been made in reaching a compromise on the proposed UN resolution to send the weapons inspectors back into Iraq.

"I think we're moving in the right direction," he told France's state-owned RFI radio station from Beirut, where he was attending a conference of heads of French-speaking states.

Paris has repeatedly called for two UN resolutions on Iraq -- one defining a tough new mandate for UN weapons inspectors, and a second that could threaten the use of force if Iraq failed to comply with UN demands.

Chirac reiterated his insistence that "there can be no automatic (military) intervention" in Iraq, while adding that an intervention could not be excluded.

Jordan's King Abdullah II warned ahead of Chirac's visit to Amman Sunday that a US military strike on Iraq could weaken international efforts to combat terrorism worldwide.

In an interview with AFP, the king, whose country is sandwiched between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iraq, stressed that France could play a key role in a settlement of the Middle East and Iraq crises.

"We fear that opening a new battlefront in the Middle East will contribute to complicating the situation and perhaps will weaken international efforts to combat terrorism, as President Chirac said last week," Abdullah said.

The Jordanian monarch stressed that the Middle East was "fertile ground for terrorist operations" because of the conflicts raging in the region.

Chirac said in an interview with a Lebanese newspaper Wednesday that an attack on Iraq might also have repercussions for what the United States terms a worldwide "war on terror."

"We cannot exclude the fact that terrorist groups could use the Iraqi crisis as a pretext to new action and an argument for propaganda," Chirac told L'Orient-Le Jour newspaper.

Abdullah also reiterated that Jordan would "continue to demand a settlement to the Iraqi crisis through a dialogue with the United Nations," warning anew that a war would have "devastating" consequences for the region.

In Baghdad, Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz repeated Iraq's position that there was no need for a new UN resolution on the return of weapons inspectors to the country.

"Our position has been and remains that there is no need for a new (UN) resolution to set up the work of the inspectors," he told reporters in Baghdad Friday.

In Kuwait, Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah urged Iraq on Saturday to fully comply with relevant UN resolutions in order to avert a US strike.

"Iraq is required to abide fully by UN resolutions ... whose full implementation is the only means of ... sparing the region and the brotherly Iraqi people the horrors of military action with unpredictable consequences," he said.

The Kuwaiti ruler made his remarks in a speech read on his behalf by Foreign Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah at the opening of the Kuwaiti parliament's new term.

Sheikh Sabah meanwhile told the local daily Al-Rai Al-Aam that while the return of Kuwait's national archives looted by Iraq during its 1990-1991 occupation of the emirate was "important," a more important issue was that of the 600-odd Kuwaitis missing since the 1991 Gulf War and who Kuwait says are held by Baghdad.

Kuwait's foreign ministry undersecretary Khaled al-Jarallah told AFP that the handover of the archives through UN officials would begin on Sunday.

The handover will take place at the Abdali border point on the Kuwaiti side of the demilitarized zone along the Iraq-Kuwait frontier.

PHOTO CAPTION

U.N. weapons inspectors watch two Austrian army soldiers extinguishing a fire during a training session at a military training area in Theresienfeld, Austria, some 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Vienna, Friday, Oct. 18, 2002. The army supports the health and safety training of the inspectors during their four-week technical training ahead of their possible redeployment to Iraq for fresh assessment of Saddam Hussein's weapons arsenal. (AP Photo/Martin Gnedt)