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UNITED NATIONS, Nov 6 (AFP) - The United States Wednesday unveiled a new draft resolution to the UN Security Council that gives Iraq one last chance to scrap its weapons of mass destruction.

"It is our intention to have the resolution put to a vote sometime during the course of the day on Friday," US ambassador John Negroponte said after two hours of council consultations.

Both China's Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan and French Foreign Minister Dominque de Villepin launched concerted rounds of UN telephone diplomacy in a bid to reach consensus within the Security Council and jump-start inspections as soon as possible.

Chief UN arms inspector Hans Blix told the council he had some practical problems with the text, but said it was his intention to lead an advance party to Baghdad "a week to 10 days after the adoption of the resolution."

The text was revised by the United States after France and Russia objected to earlier provisions which granted the automatic use of military force against Iraq.

All five permanent Security Council members -- the United States, Britain, China, France and Russia -- must agree on the resolution in order for it to pass.

France and Russia welcomed the new text but their leaders said they still wanted "ambiguities" taken out.

Negroponte said the text could be further amended in council consultations Thursday to take account Blix's input.

In what was probably its most important change, the draft put the disputed words "Iraq has been and remains in material breach of its obligations" into a new context.

France and Russia had argued the words could be construed as saying the February 1991 ceasefire which ended the last Gulf War no longer holds, and the United States was therefore free to attack Iraq.

The new draft said the council would "afford Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations" in spite of previous breaches, but warned that if Blix reported Iraq was obstructing the inspections, the council would convene immediately to consider the situation.

French President Jacques Chirac told Russian President Vladimir Putin he hoped the resolution would be adopted unanimously, but said all risk of the automatic use of force must be excluded.

"For us the objective has to be to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction. It is not an EU objective to change the regime," the EU's foreign policy envoy Javier Solana stressed in the European parliament in Brussels.

"There has been a lot of talk over the weeks of so-called "hidden trigger" -- that somehow this resolution is intended to be used by the United States as a pretext for the immediate use of force," Negroponte said.

"President (George W.) Bush has said on repeated occasions that as far as he's concerned, war would be a last resort and that he wants to give the United Nations and the Security Council a chance."

However, Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell have both said the United States would not be handcuffed if the council withheld approval for an attack on Iraq.

In Baghdad, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz accused the United States of seeking to carve up the Middle East into several marginal states.

"The United States has declared Iraq as a target, but in reality all the region is threatened with being broken up into several marginal states," Aziz said, quoted by the official Iraqi news agency INA.

Aziz said Washington wanted to "plunge the region again into the colonial system of long ago."

However, he praised opposition to US plans to strike Iraq, saying "time is playing in favor of these forces, and demonstrators are expressing themselves more and more in the capitals of the world, notably in the United States, and rejecting this aggression.

"These demonstrators are not convinced of the legitimacy of the US position that is threatening peace and stability in the world," Aziz said.

And many political leaders around the world, while congratulating Bush on the Republican victory in congressional elections, feared the result had dealt a potentially fatal blow to efforts to avert war in Iraq.

Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi expressed hope Bush would still respect global opinion about a future attack despite his success in domestic elections, Kyodo News reported.

In Moscow, there was no immediate official response from Putin's office or the foreign ministry to the results.

But senior Russian lawmakers agreed that while the US electorate may not have been driven by considerations over Iraq, they had effectively given the Bush administration carte blanche in its war on terror.

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