Iraq wants to cooperate and counter the charges made by chief UN weapons inspectors that disarmament is not complete, as the United States pushes on towards a military attack, a senior academic has said.

"We are doing our best to show that Iraq is serious in its cooperation with the inspectors because we want the world to know the truth," said Abdul Razzak al-Duleimi, head of the journalism department at Baghdad University.

"We do not have weapons of mass destruction, and the US administration is lying," he told AFP on Wednesday.

Baghdad seemed taken aback by the strongly worded status report submitted Monday by chief disarmament inspector Hans Blix in which he said no banned weapons had been found so far, but listed unanswered questions on Iraq's arms programmes from anthrax to VX nerve agents and missiles.

Iraqi leaders then multiplied efforts to convince the international community of Baghdad's good intentions and that, despite nearly 500 field checks carried out in two months of inspections, no illegal arms programs had been found.

"We are always ready to cooperate more ... but without having Iraq in the position of a suspect who should prove his innocence," said presidential advisor Amer Rashid.

In a letter to UN chief Kofi Annan, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said Baghdad was committed to cooperating "actively" with arms experts "so they can undertake the tasks assigned to them in a easy and flexible way." Sabri also told Annan Baghdad will continue to respect the commitments it had made in the written joint declaration with the United Nations on January 20.

In the 10-point declaration, Iraq promised to provide open access to all suspect sites, to encourage scientists to accept private interviews and to provide a complete list of Iraqi scientists working in weapons programmes.

Iraq also announced the creation of an enquiry commission for the issue of recently discovered empty warheads and to carry out searches for any remaining ones.

"The message we want to tell the world is that all that Iraq is suffering has nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction. The US wants to control Iraq's oil and stop Baghdad's backing the Palestinian cause," said Duleimi.

A Western diplomat here said Iraq could do more by providing evidence on the destruction of banned weapons, identifying the persons who destroyed them and giving details where and when the weapons were destroyed.

"In a country as centralised as Iraq, they should have records of such destruction," the diplomat told AFP.

But Baghdad remains realistic and knows the US war machine may not be stopped.

"One tends to think it (war) is coming, no matter what we do," another presidential advisor, Amer Saadi, recently told journalists.

President George W. Bush said Washington would go before the Security Council February 5 to detail evidence of Iraq's illegal weapons programmes, its efforts to thwart UN inspectors and its ties to terrorists - including Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, the group behind the September 11, 2001 attacks - Sapa/AFP.