As President George W Bush scrambled to avoid political fallout over Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction, his closest allies came under pressure yesterday to follow his example and order an independent inquiry into the failure of their intelligence services.

A senior administration official said Sunday that Bush would this week "announce the creation of a bipartisan independent commission to undertake a broad assessment of our intelligence, particularly as relates to weapons of mass destruction and counter proliferation".

Bush had previously dodged calls for a probe but, with a presidential election now nine months off, he changed his mind under pressure from leading members of his Republican Party as well as his Democrat rivals.

He did so after David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group set up after the invasion in March last year to unearth stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, said he had found nothing because there was nothing to find.

Kay, who resigned as chief of the ISG last month, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday that "we were almost all wrong" about the threat posed by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before his overthrow.

In London, Britain's opposition Conservative Party seized on Bush's about-turn to ratchet up the pressure on Prime Minister Tony Blair, his closest ally in the invasion of Iraq in March last year.

"Everybody, I think, now recognises that something went wrong over the intelligence," Conservative leader Michael Howard told the independent ITV television network.

"I hope that Tony Blair won't continue to be the odd man out on this," Howard said, adding that he would put forward a parliamentary motion demanding a probe into the quality of data on Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.

In the Australian capital, Canberra, the opposition Labor Party demanded that Prime Minister John Howard too order an independent investigation.

But Howard, who was hailed by Bush as "a man of steel" for supporting the war, claimed that Australia bore next to no responsibility for the faulty analysis of the threat from Iraq.

"Almost all the intelligence that came our way in relation to the war in Iraq pertained from British and American sources," Howard said.

By announcing the probe, Bush could at least partially control the impact of what has become a major issue in the campaign for the presidential election on November 2.

The Washington Post reported yesterday that the nine-member panel would report in 2005.

Democrats seeking Bush's job have hammered the president with accusations his administration lied or distorted information to justify an invasion.

"We need to find out what the truth is. What information did the president have? What information did the intelligence community give to the president? Was the information flawed? Was it exaggerated, either by the vice president or the president?" Senator John Edwards, one of the Democrats seeking to challenge Bush in November, said in an appearance on CBS' "Face the Nation" programme.

"Those are all things the American people deserve to know. We need to get to the bottom of this".

Some of Bush's Republican allies in the US Congress also have backed calls for a probe out of concerns that the nation's intelligence network - the world's biggest and most technologically advanced - is seriously flawed.

"I'm not a fan of commissions, generally speaking. ... But in this case, there's no question that there was an intelligence failure, in some form or another," Senator Trent Lott, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox.

Blair, who is likely to call an election next year, faces a potentially difficult grilling when he makes a regular appearance before a parliamentary committee today.

The Times newspaper, citing a government source, said yesterday that the prime minister was preparing to admit that weapons of mass destruction may never be found, but the daily Guardian said he would resist calls for an inquiry.

A Downing Street spokesperson said: "We have been in close discussion with the US government in the last few days, but we will not comment further until an official statement is made by the US". – Sapa-AFP.