By JIM ABRAMS
.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (Oct. 2) - Unswayed by a new U.N. plan for arms inspections, President Bush and House leaders agreed Wednesday on a compromise resolution to authorize the use of force in Iraq. A top Senate Democrat suggested the plan was fast gaining momentum and might win support in the Senate as well.

''I'm a realist,'' said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden, D-Del.

Biden said that he and Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., still planned to offer an alternative that would put more emphasis on diplomacy and a role for the United Nations.

But he conceded he could see little support for such an approach.

Although originally the Senate had planned to vote on the measure first, Biden said he now expects the House to vote first - increasing pressure on the Senate to pass a measure more to the president's liking.

As part of the deal with the House, Bush bent to Democratic wishes and pledged to certify to Congress - before any military strike, if feasible, or within 48 hours of a U.S. attack - that diplomatic and other peaceful means alone are inadequate to protect Americans from Saddam's weapons of mass destruction.

House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt announced the agreement as he emerged from an hour-long White House breakfast with Bush and headed back to Capitol Hill to brief Democrats on the wording of the resolution expected to be debated in the House International Relations Committee this week.

''Members are trying to deal with this in the right way,'' Gephardt told reporters after he met with his colleagues. ''We've got to keep this out of politics,'' he added. ''This is about life and death.''

On the Senate side, Biden said he thought Gephardt had made a mistake in agreeing so readily to the plan. ''Democrats are obviously in disagreement,'' he said.

Still, Biden dropped plans to try to take up his substitute proposal in his committee and said that he and Lugar would likely just offer it as an amendment when the Senate debates the Iraq war resolution.

But Biden acknowledged that he would not likely prevail - and that, effectively, negotiations on the wording of the resolution were over.

Biden said that he expected two influential senators - Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn., and Sen. John Warner, R-Va. - to join forces later Wednesday in backing the compromise between the White House and the House of Representatives and pushing it in the Senate.

The House resolution is similar to the one proposed last week by Bush and gives him broad powers to use military force against Baghdad if he deems it necessary. Democrats in the Senate and moderate Republicans hoped to put some checks on his authority.

Biden's earlier efforts to take up his measure in his committee were frustrated by a procedural objection lodged by the panel's top Republican and former chairman, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C.

The House resolution is similar to the one proposed last week by Bush and gives him broad powers to use military force against Baghdad if he deems it necessary. Democrats in the Senate and moderate Republicans hope to put some checks on his authority.

The House resolution expected to be debated in the International Relations Committee beginning this week authorizes Bush to ''use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to 1) defend the national security interests of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq and 2) to enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.''

The resolution also requires Bush to report to Congress every 60 days on ''matters relevant'' to the confrontation with Iraq. And, it reaffirms the policy embedded in U.S. law that Saddam should be overthrown.

As Gephardt, D-Mo., explained the final deal: ''Iraq is a problem. It presents a problem after 9/11 that it did not before and we should deal with it diplomatically if we can, militarily if we must. And I think this resolution does that.''

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said Bush ''believes it will make available the tools he needs to deal seriously with the threat that Saddam Hussein'' poses.

The White House made plans for Bush to discuss the resolution in a public event later Wednesday.

While the president and Gephardt conferred over breakfast with Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., a dozen women crowded around the White House's northwest gate in protest.

''No war in Iraq,'' read a banner they hung on the executive mansion's wrought-iron gate while one woman mounted the fence and shouted from the top of its post before being talked down by Secret Service officers.

Daschle told reporters he expected that ''at the end of the day we're going to have a broad level of support on both sides of the aisle for a resolution that indicates our support for the United Nations effort and our support for the administration's effort in dealing with Iraq.''

Agreement on an Iraq resolution could set the stage for a strong vote for the president's policies before Congress recesses for the election campaign.

The administration was also pressing the U.N. Security Council to accept a proposed U.S.-British resolution to disarm Iraq, a campaign complicated by an agreement announced in Austria Tuesday between Baghdad and U.N. arms inspectors.

''The president sees what Iraq is discussing yesterday in Vienna as an Iraqi ploy to string out the world as they build up their arms,'' Fleischer said.

''The president believes that any inspection regime that was done the way it was done under previous resolutions is doomed to fail. ... Obviously, the cat and mouse games have begun.''

AP-NY-10-02-02 1249EDT

Copyright 2002 The Associated Press.