Full EU co-operation in rebuilding a post-war Iraq will be in doubt unless any military action is sanctioned by the UN, EU Commissioner Mr Chris Patten warned today.
He insisted he was not making threats - just stating the obvious, he told the European Parliament in Strasbourg.
Without UN backing and with a divided EU it would be "difficult" to provide "generous" financial help for Iraq from Europe's heavily-committed external relations budget.
Mr Patten said fifteen million euro (£10.3 million) had already been set aside in EU humanitarian aid for Iraq during the current crisis, but in the event of war the demands for help would go far beyond that.
Mr Patten, in charge of EU external relations policy, told MEPs: "As you are all too well aware in this House, Europe's external relations budget is already heavily committed.
"It will be very difficult in any circumstances to launch massive new programmes in Iraq and in the neighbourhood of Iraq.
"But it will be that much more difficult for the EU to co-operate fully and on a large scale also in the longer-term reconstruction process if events unfold without proper UN cover and if the member states remain divided."
The Commissioner said he was not threatening EU non-co-operation if America proceeded without UN backing: "I am making, rather, a simple observation of fact: that if it comes to war, it will be very much easier to persuade you, the EU budgetary authority, to be generous if there is no dispute about the legitimacy of the military action that has taken place; about the new political order that emerges thereafter; or about who is in charge of the reconstruction process.
"I am not making a quasi-legal point - I am simply offering a political judgment of no great novelty or sagacity. It seems pretty obvious."