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US and British leaders have again been forced onto the defensive over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The pressure mounted even as leaders of the Group of Eight industrialised powers sought to put Iraq tensions behind them at their summit in France overnight.

Washington and London used accusations that Iraq was secretly developing chemical and biological weapons as the main justification to launch the war on Saddam Hussein.

But critics have said intelligence evidence was deliberately twisted to whip up support for an invasion.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair angrily denied the suggestions at the G8 summit in the French resort of Evian.

"The idea that we doctored intelligence reports in order to invent some notion about a 45-minute capability of delivering weapons of mass destruction is completely and totally false," he said.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, speaking in Rome, said: "There were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It wasn't a figment of anyone's imagination."

In Russia, which opposed the war, a top official urged the United States to quickly clear up the issue. "This should not be allowed to be dragged out," said Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov.

US lawmakers said they would investigate whether Washington officials had exaggerated claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Senator John Warner said the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees would hold joint hearings into whether an intelligence breakdown occured in the run-up to the Iraq war, or whether officials oversold intelligence data to whip up domestic support for the conflict.

A senior US congressman, Henry Waxman of California, alleged that the Bush administration used forged documents to make its case in favour of invading Iraq.

Meanwhile, at the United Nations, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said UN arms inspectors could resume work in Iraq in two weeks if needed.

The inspectors left the country just before the war began in March. Washington has since said that it opposes their return in the short term, and has instead sent 1300 of its own experts.

In Iraq, distribution of food rations resumed overnight for the first time since the war broke out, but the UN's World Food Program (WFP) said just 1000 people in Baghdad received the package.

The ration program, begun after the UN imposed sanctions on Iraq following its 1990 invasion of Kuwait, was the main source of food for about 60 per cent of Iraq's 26 million people before the war.

Run by the WFP under Saddam's regime, the program is now supervised by the US authorities in the country, with WFP charged with buying and shipping the food to the Iraqi trade ministry.

The new UN special representative to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, has said Iraqis should rule themselves as quickly as possible.

"The sooner the Iraqi people govern themselves, the better," he told reporters after touching down in Baghdad.

Vieira de Mello shrugged off questions that he would have no executive power to counter the weight of the US-led occupation administration.

Instead he insisted he had been given a wide brief by the May 22 UN Security Council resolution which lifted sanctions on Iraq to co-ordinate "a number of areas ranging from reconstruction to economic development, civil administration, police and justice".

An interim administration is to be installed in Iraq within six weeks, headed by a political council that will appoint ministers in waiting, US officials have said.

The occupation authority will appoint the council following what it said would be wide-ranging consultations with Iraqis, after a decision to scrap a promised national political conference that had already been twice delayed.

The 25 to 30-strong body would advise the authority on the whole range of policy issues, economic as well as political, and name "key advisors" to Iraq's ministries who would work in close co-ordination with the coalition's own overseers, a senior authority official said.

The Iraqis named to the ministries would be given progressively greater responsibilities "up to the point where the different advisors would become the interim ministers," the official said.

Iraq's top US overseer Paul Bremer said the coalition would also start recruiting soldiers for a new Iraqi army by the end of the month, in the face of mounting protests by jobless demobilised soldiers.

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