UNITED NATIONS, November 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Iraq wrote to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan Wednesday, November 13, confirming it unconditionally accepts Security Council resolution 1441 on disarmament, with Washington and London cautiously welcoming the decision.

"The letter says that Iraq accepts the resolution, unreservedly, without conditions," Iraq's Ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed al-Douri told reporters.

"The letter says that Iraq accepts the resolution, and accepts the return of the inspectors as foreseen in the resolution," Agence France-Presse (AFP) quoted him as saying.

Resolution 1441, adopted unanimously by the Security Council Friday, November 8, gave the Iraqi government seven days to accept its terms.

The Iraqi parliament voted unanimously Tuesday, November 12, to reject the resolution, but left the last word to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

"The government of Iraq decided it," Al-Douri said, adding: "They decided right now because they decided it is the right time to answer."

He said the government always chose "peaceful means to protect the country from the threat of war."

The letter, signed by Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, was distributed to members of the Security Council and made available to reporters.

The words, "We hereby inform you that we will deal with Resolution 1441," came in the middle of a nine-page letter, sharply critical of the aggressive policies of U.S. President George W. Bush towards Iraq.

In the letter, Sabri did not explicitly say that Iraq accepted Resolution 1441 unconditionally, and he ended by saying that he would write another letter to Annan explaining why Iraq considered its provisions illegal.

The resolution gave Iraq 30 days to make a full and accurate declaration of its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

Sabri's letter did not refer to this requirement.

It accused Bush and "his lackey Tony Blair", the British prime minister, of spreading "the most wicked slander against Iraq" by claiming it was preparing to produce nuclear weapons.

"They both know, as well as we do, and so can other countries, that such fabrications are baseless," Sabri wrote.

He added that other members of the Security Council "adopted a text under the pretext that it would be better to take the kicks of a raging bull in a small circle than to face its horns in an open space."

The White House cautiously welcomed Baghdad's pledge to accept the U.N. resolution, saying the Iraqis must further signal cooperation "by their actions."

"The latest reports that the regime in Iraq has agreed to cooperate and comply ... we have heard this before, and now it's time to see it by their actions," spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.

Britain said Iraq had taken a "first step" in announcing that it had accepted the U.N. resolution, but warned that vigilance was needed over what it described as Iraqi President’s Saddam Hussein's "notoriously changeable" intentions.

Following reports of the Iraqi acceptance, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said an advance team headed by U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and Director General of the IAEA Mohamed El-Baradei will be "going back [to Iraq] on Monday".

"Nothing changes for us. We were planning to go back, with the expectation that Iraq would accept the resolution," said Fleming.

The inspectors had set November 18 as the date for their return to Iraq to resume inspections of alleged suspected weapons sites after a four-year absence.

Blix and El-Baradei will leave Iraq Wednesday, but a logistics team will stay behind "to immediately work on setting up a headquarters."

The actual inspections are to begin "a week or 10 days after that," she said.

Under the U.N. resolution, inspections must start within 45 days, that is to say by December 23.

Earlier in Moscow, Russia warned the United States against taking the law into its own hands over Iraq, saying Washington would be breaking international law if it went ahead with strikes without U.N. approval.

An advance team of arms inspectors "going back [to Iraq] on Monday": Fleming

Amid reports that Iraq has accepted U.N. Security Council resolution 1441, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Yury Fedotov stressed that Washington was now itself obliged to keep to the draft's wording - which does not include an automatic threat of force.

"I hope that in future they will not violate international law," Fedotov told reporters, referring to U.S. bombing raids on Iraq in December 1998 which he described as "a clear violation of international law."

Those attacks "began during a U.N. debate on the Butler weapons inspections report," Fedotov said in reference to the then chief U.N. weapons inspector Richard Butler.

After a stand-off between the weapons inspectors and Iraqi officials in December 1998, Butler withdrew his team and the United States and Britain bombed suspected weapons sites and other Iraqi military targets.

No weapons inspections have been carried out in Iraq since then.

But should Iraq stray from the resolution's wording, a senior Russian official said, Saddam's regime "will hit a dead end" from which Moscow will be unable to help it out.

"It will be difficult to imagine future cooperation between Moscow and Baghdad in case of a military solution," said the foreign ministry special assignments envoy Alexander Kalugin.

"The results will be negative [for Iraq]. The economy will suffer and people will die."

Russia and France fought furiously to make sure that the U.N. resolution did not include an automatic threat of the use of force against 12-year-sanction-hit Iraq.

"We will do everything we can to make sure that this problem does not stray off the diplomatic track ... and then push for a review of the U.N. sanctions regime" against Iraq, said Fedotov, who is Moscow's chief negotiator in the United Nations.

But he conceded that the new resolution had put added pressures on Saddam that did not exist in previous U.N. drafts, saying the new resolution "does not stray far" from previous ones.

Washington has argued that 1441's wording does not preclude a unilateral U.S. decision to attack.