WASHINGTON (AFP) - President George W Bush yesterday joined a chorus of US-allied leaders in defending the Iraq war from UN chief Kofi Annan's charge that it was illegal.

Australia, Britain, Bulgaria, Japan and Poland, which supported the war with combat or humanitarian troops, all earlier insisted that the war had been backed by international law.

Bush did not directly address Annan's comment to the BBC that failure to get a second UN Security Council resolution explicitly authorising military action meant that "from the (UN) charter point of view it was illegal".

However, Bush pointed to the council's unanimous endorsement, in November 2002, of resolution 1441, which warned Saddam Hussein of "serious consequences" if he were still seeking weapons of mass destruction.

"The United Nations looked at the same intelligence I looked at. They concluded Saddam Hussein was a threat. They voted by 15-0 in the UN Security Council for Saddam Hussein to disclose, disarm or face serious consequences," said Bush, on a campaign stop in Minnesota two months from a November 2 election on whether he serves a second, four-year term.

The vast caches of Iraqi weapons at the core of his public case for war did not materialise.

Annan, in an interview Wednesday with the BBC, said, "it was up to the Security Council to approve or determine what those consequences should be.

"From the (UN) charter point of view it was illegal."

British Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt said "we spelt out at the time our reasons for believing the conflict in Iraq was indeed lawful and why we believed it was necessary to uphold those UN resolutions".

Hewitt, whose government sent thousands of troops to Iraq for the invasion and has kept them there, conceded on BBC radio that there was disagreement between international lawyers over the war's legality.

In Sydney, Australian Prime Minister John Howard not only rejected Annan's remarks but slammed the United Nations as a "paralysed" body, incapable of acting on major crises, such as the current one in Sudan's Darfur region.

The invasion was "entirely valid" legally based on experts in Australia and UN resolutions, Howard said.

Australia still has several hundred military personnel in Iraq. Howard has been accused of misleading the public over the reasons for going to war and on other issues.

In a statement in Warsaw, the Polish foreign ministry's spokesman Boguslaw Majewski said the "decisions taken by the international community had legal bases".

In deploying 2,500 troops of its own to post-invasion Iraq, Poland "acted in line with the Polish Constitution by referring to UN Security Council resolution 1441 of November 8, 2002", the spokesman said.

"The use of force against Iraq was also justified by two previous resolutions", those of 1990 and 1991, he said.

In Sofia, Bulgarian foreign ministry spokeswoman Guergana Grantcharova also cited previous resolutions as supporting the case for war. Bulgaria has nearly 500 troops in Iraq.

Grantcharova also said UN resolution 687 still applied. By calling for "all necessary means" to restore international peace, that resolution opened the way for the 1991 Gulf war to end Iraq's occupation of Kuwait.

In Tokyo, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda, the government's main spokesman, told reporters that Annan's remarks were "unclear" and Japanese officials would make inquiries about "his real meaning".

Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Iraq invasion led by US and British troops, despite widespread objections from the general public in Japan.

After the invasion, Tokyo last December sent troops to Iraq on a non-combat, humanitarian mission, Japan's first military deployment since World War II in a country where fighting was under way.

In The Hague, Iraq's visiting interim president Ghazi al-Yawar dodged questions about the legitimacy of the war, saying Annan was an "honourable guy".

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