SAUDI ARABIA has turned up the pressure on Baghdad, hinting that it might offer its desert installations as a jump-off base for any U.S. military campaign against Iraq, as long as such an attack had U.N. sanction.

　　But the Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, also said the rest of the world clearly wants the Iraq crisis resolved without "the firing of a single shot."

　　Saud's statement was issued Sunday in New York as the U.N. General Assembly wrapped up the fourth day of its opening general debate, a day on which other Arab leaders also addressed the explosive impasse over Iraq.

　　Appearing before the General Assembly on Thursday, U.S. President Bush called on the U.N. Security Council to take decisive action to pressure Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government into allowing U.N. weapons inspectors back into Iraq and dismantling any Iraqi chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or the capacity to build them.

　　If the U.N. failed to act, Bush made clear, Washington would feel free to attack Iraq on its own.

　　As the Bush administration in recent months raised this possibility of a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq, the Saudis ruled out use of their bases for such a campaign.

　　Some 5,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Saudi Arabia, most at the remote Prince Sultan Air Base. In the 1991 Gulf War, Saudi Arabia was the main base for a half-million-strong, U.S.-led military force that drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait. But since then the Saudis have periodically prohibited the use of their soil for strikes against Iraq and, more recently, limited the use of their bases for the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.