By Nick Childs BBC Pentagon correspondent

The American Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, has said it is not easy to envisage the re-establishment of a fully effective weapons inspection regime in Iraq.

It's not going to be an easy task to have an inspection regime that can give us the kind of confidence we need to have

American Deputy Defence Secretary, Paul Wolfowitz

The United Nations has been holding talks with Iraq about resuming inspections against the background of reports that Washington is considering military action to try to unseat the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.

The outcome of the current dialogue between the UN and Iraq over new weapons inspections could be crucial to the prospects of a new confrontation between Washington and Baghdad.

But Pentagon officials have made no secret of the fact that they are sceptical that new inspections can eliminate the security threat which President Bush says Iraq represents.

Forging support

In his State of the Union address, Mr Bush labelled the country - along with Iran and North Korea - as part of an axis of evil pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

The Mid-East conflict is central to thinking about Iraq

Mr Wolfowitz says that even at their most effective, previous UN inspectors had to rely on defectors to provide crucial information on Iraq's weapons programmes.

"It's not going to be an easy task to have an inspection regime that can give us the kind of confidence we need to have, " Mr Wolfowitz said.

But it is thought the State Department believes that pursuing inspections could help in forging international support for a possible new showdown with Iraq.

Mid East conflict

There is also a debate in Washington over whether action against Iraq is possible before the current Israeli-Palestinian tensions have been defused.

Mr Wolfowitz, who has a reputation as one of the Bush administration's more hawkish members, says the more progress that can be made on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the more support the US will be able to garner for other operations.

But he also suggests that the ability to make progress on the peace process is linked to US regional strength.

It was no accident, he says, that the breakthrough with the Oslo peace process came after the US victory over Iraq in 1991.