CLINTON'S MESSAGE TO SADDAM: YOU CANNOT DEFY WILL OF WORLD.

Byline: Steven Erlanger The New York Times

President Clinton sought to intensify pressure on Iraq on Tuesday, dispatching senior officials to consult with American allies in Europe and the Middle East, and warning President Saddam Hussein, in the State of the Union address, that his defiance of the United Nations cannot continue.

In his speech Tuesday night to a joint session of Congress, Clinton told the Iraqi president: ``You cannot defy the will of the world.'' Saddam has used weapons of mass destruction before, Clinton noted, and said, ``We are determined to deny you the capacity to use them again.''

Clinton said he spoke ``for everyone in this chamber, Republicans and Democrats,'' acknowledging a unity on Iraq that was missing in the Congress before the Persian Gulf War, even after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990.

``Together,'' Clinton said, the United States ``must confront new hazards: chemical and biological weapons which could be used against us by outlaw states, terrorists and organized criminals.

``Saddam Hussein has spent the better part of this decade, and much of his nation's wealth, not on providing for the Iraqi people but on developing nuclear, chemical and biological weapons - and the missiles to deliver them,'' Clinton continued.

While the U.N. weapons inspectors ``have done a remarkable job, finding and destroying more of Iraq's arsenal than was destroyed during the Gulf War itself,'' Clinton said, Saddam ``wants to stop them from completing their mission.''

In his speech, Clinton made no direct reference to joint American and British plans for military strikes against Iraq unless Saddam capitulates.

But all day long, the drumbeat of military noises - and the urgent dispatch of American Cabinet members to consult with allies - gave a sense of moment to Clinton's words.

Clinton is considering sending Defense Secretary William Cohen to the Persian Gulf early next week to seek backing for a military strike against Iraq if Saddam continues to block the inspections, and American officials have begun to talk more openly of attacking Iraq.

``There is an increasing feeling that the diplomatic options have exhausted themselves,'' Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon said Tuesday. ``And that leaves us little choice to achieve our goals than to look at military action.''

Clinton plans to send Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to Europe on Thursday, where she will confer with the British, French and Russian foreign ministers about Iraq. ``She will go to explain the stakes involved and her feeling that diplomatic options are becoming exhausted,'' a senior administration official said.

Nonetheless, the British are taking the lead in discussing a new resolution to be introduced in the U.N. Security Council that will try to give Saddam another chance to back down in the face of the military threat, while a Russian diplomat is in Baghdad trying to find a way to avoid a military strike against Iraq.