LONDON -- A possible war against Iraq is not likely before the end of February as Britain and the United States need time to send enough forces to the region, a defense expert in London said Thursday.

"There's still probably a couple of months altogether before we end up in a potential war situation" allowing Iraq plenty of time to cooperate, said Timothy Garden from the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

"If you look at the buildup of forces and the announcement this week by the UK that it's doing the preparatory moves it would take a certainly a month to get everything into theater after you start deploying," the former serviceman told bbc radio.

the british defence ministry annouced wednesday that a naval force led by the aircraft carrier ark royal will head for the gulf next month, adding that it was looking at "contingency measures" in case of possible military action in iraq.

"and for the americans, they are at about 70,000 troops and the assumption is they will need considerably more than that. all these logistic moves take us into really february before you're ready to do a military operation," garden said.

"it's always possible to go immediately with much lower force levels but it's highly risky and i think given that we're still in a process of diplomatic negociations there would not be great wide spread support for military action there".

"it's very unlikely that the us and the uk with it will go early because of the extra military risks as well," he said. asked about the work of un weapons inspectors in iraq, garden said: "i don't doubt as we get towards the end game, there will be much more focused attention on where the inspectors should go."

after a certain amount of time british and american intelligence services will "increasingly want to direct the inspectors to a suspect (weapons) site," he said.