Washington, Dec 17: The US is carrying out a "thoughtful" review of the voluminous Iraq arms declaration and there is no pressure from President George W Bush to rush as the document can be the "difference between war and peace", white house Ari Fleischer said. President Bush "did not put any type of artificial deadline on the amount of time it would take to do this thoughtfully and deliberatively," Fleischer told reporters yesterday. The president may speak out publicly on the declaration this week, he said. "It's always being considered for when the president is going to talk about something as important as the Iraqi declaration," he said. "The president's approach and the president's instructions were to do this (review) in a way that would be deliberative, that would be full, that would be thoughtful," he said.

The review was an important task as the "declaration that Iraq has filed can be the difference between war and peace," the spokesman said.

He called the declaration Iraq's "last chance" to come clean. "It was absolutely plain, from the will of the United Nations, that this was Iraq's last chance to inform the world in an accurate complete and full way what weapons of mass destruction they possessed," Fleischer said.

Bureau Report