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A defiant Iraq threatened to unleash suicide attacks against US nationals in the Middle East and to wipe out any invading force should Washington wage a new war against it.
The warnings by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan were made public Saturday -- the day after US President George W. Bush met his close ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and declared that conflict could be "weeks, not months" away.
Suicide attacks "are our new weapons," Ramadan told Monday's edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, adding: "The whole region will be set ablaze. This part of the world will become a sea of resistance and danger for Americans."
Official newspapers in Baghdad on Saturday quoted Saddam telling senior military aides that if war happens, "the enemy will not enter Baghdad's suburbs because he will die. Even if they send a million soldiers, our boys will kill them."
On Friday, Bush said he would welcome a new UN resolution authorising force against Iraq as long as there was no attempt by the Security Council "to drag the process on for months".
He also insisted that last November's resolution mandating tough arms inspections in Iraq already "gives us the authority to move without any second resolution" -- a contention rejected by most Security Council members.
But Jimmy Carter, former US president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, unleashed his most vitriolic attack so far on Bush's policy towards Iraq.
"Despite marshalling powerful armed forces in the Persian Gulf region and a virtual declaration of war in the State of the Union message, our government has not made a case for a preemptive military strike against Iraq, either at home or in Europe," Carter said in a statement released late on Friday.
Carter mentioned the results of a recent survey that showed 84 percent of Europeans believed the US posed "the greatest danger to world peace".
"It's sobering to realize how much doubt and consternation has been raised about our motives for war in the absence of convincing proof of a genuine threat from Iraq," Carter said.
But Blair defended Bush's position in an interview with BBC radio.
"What he is anxious to ensure, and what I am anxious to ensure, is that the whole debate about a second resolution doesn't just become a means of putting this thing off for months and months and months."
"I believe there will be a second resolution," the prime minister had earlier told reporters on his flight back to London.
"I think it will be very clear to people whether Saddam is cooperating or not in the next few weeks."
British news reports said Blair and Bush had fixed a deadline of mid-March for Saddam to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction or face war, leaving just six weeks for diplomacy.
On Tuesday, he is to hold a summit with French President Jacques Chirac, who just this week declared that "nothing justifies military action".
Washington and London also hope to sway France and other reluctant allies on Wednesday, when US Secretary of State Colin Powell is to present intelligence on Baghdad's attempts to thwart UN inspections as well as its alleged links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
UN inspector Hans Blix and Mohamad ElBaradei, the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are to fly to Baghdad for meetings with senior Iraqi officials next Saturday and Sunday.
Greece, which holds the European Union presidency, said it would wait to hear what Powell had to say before deciding whether to back military action.
The next edition of Focus, a Germany weekly, meanwhile reported that Germany's foreign intelligence service BND believes Iraq has mobile chemical and biological weapons labs disguised as ordinary trucks.
It also quoted Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa as saying that "war cannot produce democracy" and calling for the inspectors to be allowed to complete their mission.
In Jordan, around 10,000 people demonstrated on Saturday against the threat of a US-led war on Iraq, assembling in a park before marching to the local UN offices, which were surrounded by police.
The United States, Britain and Australia have a massive land, sea and air mobilisation that will see more than 150,000 service personnel, several aircraft carriers and hundreds of warplanes deployed to the Gulf by mid-February.
Around 100 US and British special forces also flew in from Jordan on a six-day covert mission in western Iraq to identify key targets in the event of a war, Britain's Daily Telegraph reported, quoting defence sources.
US embassies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia began advising their nationals to leave the countries on Friday and Saturday, as Israel's top security chief Ehpraim Halevy travelled to Washington to meet senior officials for discussions on the threat to Israel posed by a war in Iraq.
But Turkey said it had no immediate plans to ask parliamentary deputies to approve the deployment of US soldiers on its soil, despite intense pressure from Washington.
Iraq meanwhile denied a report that it had imported materials used to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles from an Indian firm.
"This is disinformation, part of a campaign waged by Western media to distort Iraq's position," said Zuhair al-Qazzaz, director of the Fallujah II plant where the weapon-making materials allegedly ended up.
The Los Angeles Times last month reported that an Indian trading firm used front companies to export materials that could be used by Iraq to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles -- such as atomized aluminum powder and titanium centrifugal pumps -- between September 1998 and February 2001.
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030201/1/370ci.html
The warnings by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan were made public Saturday -- the day after US President George W. Bush met his close ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and declared that conflict could be "weeks, not months" away.
Suicide attacks "are our new weapons," Ramadan told Monday's edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, adding: "The whole region will be set ablaze. This part of the world will become a sea of resistance and danger for Americans."
Official newspapers in Baghdad on Saturday quoted Saddam telling senior military aides that if war happens, "the enemy will not enter Baghdad's suburbs because he will die. Even if they send a million soldiers, our boys will kill them."
On Friday, Bush said he would welcome a new UN resolution authorising force against Iraq as long as there was no attempt by the Security Council "to drag the process on for months".
He also insisted that last November's resolution mandating tough arms inspections in Iraq already "gives us the authority to move without any second resolution" -- a contention rejected by most Security Council members.
But Jimmy Carter, former US president and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, unleashed his most vitriolic attack so far on Bush's policy towards Iraq.
"Despite marshalling powerful armed forces in the Persian Gulf region and a virtual declaration of war in the State of the Union message, our government has not made a case for a preemptive military strike against Iraq, either at home or in Europe," Carter said in a statement released late on Friday.
Carter mentioned the results of a recent survey that showed 84 percent of Europeans believed the US posed "the greatest danger to world peace".
"It's sobering to realize how much doubt and consternation has been raised about our motives for war in the absence of convincing proof of a genuine threat from Iraq," Carter said.
But Blair defended Bush's position in an interview with BBC radio.
"What he is anxious to ensure, and what I am anxious to ensure, is that the whole debate about a second resolution doesn't just become a means of putting this thing off for months and months and months."
"I believe there will be a second resolution," the prime minister had earlier told reporters on his flight back to London.
"I think it will be very clear to people whether Saddam is cooperating or not in the next few weeks."
British news reports said Blair and Bush had fixed a deadline of mid-March for Saddam to give up suspected weapons of mass destruction or face war, leaving just six weeks for diplomacy.
On Tuesday, he is to hold a summit with French President Jacques Chirac, who just this week declared that "nothing justifies military action".
Washington and London also hope to sway France and other reluctant allies on Wednesday, when US Secretary of State Colin Powell is to present intelligence on Baghdad's attempts to thwart UN inspections as well as its alleged links to the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
UN inspector Hans Blix and Mohamad ElBaradei, the head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), are to fly to Baghdad for meetings with senior Iraqi officials next Saturday and Sunday.
Greece, which holds the European Union presidency, said it would wait to hear what Powell had to say before deciding whether to back military action.
The next edition of Focus, a Germany weekly, meanwhile reported that Germany's foreign intelligence service BND believes Iraq has mobile chemical and biological weapons labs disguised as ordinary trucks.
It also quoted Arab League Secretary General Amr Mussa as saying that "war cannot produce democracy" and calling for the inspectors to be allowed to complete their mission.
In Jordan, around 10,000 people demonstrated on Saturday against the threat of a US-led war on Iraq, assembling in a park before marching to the local UN offices, which were surrounded by police.
The United States, Britain and Australia have a massive land, sea and air mobilisation that will see more than 150,000 service personnel, several aircraft carriers and hundreds of warplanes deployed to the Gulf by mid-February.
Around 100 US and British special forces also flew in from Jordan on a six-day covert mission in western Iraq to identify key targets in the event of a war, Britain's Daily Telegraph reported, quoting defence sources.
US embassies in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia began advising their nationals to leave the countries on Friday and Saturday, as Israel's top security chief Ehpraim Halevy travelled to Washington to meet senior officials for discussions on the threat to Israel posed by a war in Iraq.
But Turkey said it had no immediate plans to ask parliamentary deputies to approve the deployment of US soldiers on its soil, despite intense pressure from Washington.
Iraq meanwhile denied a report that it had imported materials used to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles from an Indian firm.
"This is disinformation, part of a campaign waged by Western media to distort Iraq's position," said Zuhair al-Qazzaz, director of the Fallujah II plant where the weapon-making materials allegedly ended up.
The Los Angeles Times last month reported that an Indian trading firm used front companies to export materials that could be used by Iraq to produce chemical weapons and long-range missiles -- such as atomized aluminum powder and titanium centrifugal pumps -- between September 1998 and February 2001.
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030201/1/370ci.html
But if he is the objective, how can you let it go unresolved as in the Osama episode?