Washington ? National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that the United Nations Security Council was aiding Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s efforts to weaken international will against his country and compared the reluctance of France and others to support war against him to appeasement of Nazi Germany before World War II.

“Any time you have a situation in which you are calling for more time rather than calling for Iraq to immediately comply” with U.N. disarmament resolutions, Rice said, “it plays into the hands” of Saddam.

“We need to remind everybody that tyrants don’t respond to any kind of appeasement,” she said. “Tyrants respond to toughness. And that was true in the 1930s and 1940s when we failed to respond to tyranny, and it is true today.” Rice spoke in interviews on “Fox News Sunday” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Rice’s comments were the Bush administration’s first extended public response to Friday’s council meeting, in which the vast majority of members spoke in favor of allowing more time for U.N. inspectors to search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. She underscored the administration’s determination to maintain pressure on the Security Council to confront Iraq despite continued resistance of some leading U.S. allies in Europe and unprecedented anti-war demonstrations around the world this weekend.

A dispute within NATO appeared to have been resolved Sunday night with agreement in Brussels to allow the trans-Atlantic alliance to help Turkey plan defensive measures against a possible war on its border with Iraq. That’s unlikely to affect the increasingly bitter Security Council row, however.

Senior administration officials have said that the United States, along with Britain, is drafting a new resolution for submission to the council this week. It’s likely to set specific disarmament tasks that Iraq must complete before the next council briefing from U.N. weapons inspectors on March 1. Assuming that Iraq won’t satisfactorily comply, officials have indicated that President Bush will then be prepared to make a war decision, with or without council agreement.

At last Friday’s meeting, statements by France, Russia, China, Germany and others that inspections should continue followed assessments by chief U.N. inspector Hans Blix and International Atomic Energy Agency Director Mohamed ElBaradei that some progress was being made.

Blix and several members raised questions about a dramatic presentation to the council on Feb. 5 in which Secretary of State Colin Powell described intelligence information he said proved Iraq was concealing alleged biological and chemical weapons facilities from inspectors and was actively involved with the al-Qaida international terrorist network.

Rice dismissed Blix’s comments, saying Sunday that “we have sources who tell us that the Iraqis, through their intelligence efforts, are working very hard to frustrate the inspections.”

“That meeting did not keep the pressure on Saddam Hussein,” Rice said of the Friday session. “In fact, I think that the Iraqis went away and said it was a great meeting, that in fact the good forces in the world were now speaking out in favor of Iraq. Is this where the governments of Europe — the French, the Germans, others — really want us to be? I think not.”