LONDON -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair has voiced alarm that a war against Iraq could unleash a Muslim backlash across the Islamic world unless the U.S. joins renewed efforts to secure peace in the Middle East, IRNA reported.

"As far as the Muslim world is concerned, the perception is we worry about Iraq but we don't care about the Middle East," Blair said.

Asked in an interview published in February's edition of the **Reader's Digest** if the U.S. was doing enough to advance peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he made it clear that more had to be done.

"America is doing what it can, but we've got to redouble our efforts because the best recruiting ground for anti-Americanism is on this issue," the British premier warned.

"You've got to engage the Arab-Muslim world in a more fundamentally long-term way about the fanaticism in parts of the Arab world, about democracy, about inter-faith understanding," he said, according to extracts of the interview.

The British government on Friday decided to press ahead with the holding its much discredited London Conference on the Middle East, which was further wrecked last week by Israel banning Palestinian representatives from attending.

The conference, to be chaired by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Tuesday, is expected to be attended by representatives of the "quartet" of the EU, U.S., Russia and the UN and several Arab countries, including Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

But the Palestinian delegation is being largely limited to contacts by telephone with Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Sha'ath, and Minister of Finance Salam Fayyad.

Straw insisted that the conference would be having the same agenda, which has been restricted to consultations on Palestinian reforms because of Israel's earlier refusal to attend. The objective of the discussions on political, administrative and constitutional reform was said to be aimed to "help the Palestinians prepare for the implementation of the road map leading to statehood."