Bush warns Saddam not to deny he has weapons

7:30am

PRAGUE - US President George W Bush warned President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday (Thursday NZT) that if he continued to deny having weapons of mass destruction he would enter his "final stage" as Iraq's leader.

Saddam's government promised to comply with UN demands that it submit a full inventory of its weapons of mass destruction by December 8. But if it maintains its flat denials that it possesses any, that might as well be a blank sheet of paper.

"We now call an end to that game of deception and deceit and denial," Bush said at a Nato summit in Prague. "Saddam Hussein has been given a very short time to declare completely and truthfully his arsenal of terror.

"Should he again deny that this arsenal exists, he will have entered his final stage with a lie, and deception this time will not be tolerated. Delay and defiance will invite the severest consequences," he said.

As if to underline the threat, US officials said they were consulting with 50 countries about what they might contribute -- from soldiers to hard cash -- to a US-led war on Iraq.

And in the kind of skirmish becoming ever more frequent, Western planes bombed anti-aircraft bases after Iraqi forces fired missiles at them, the US military said.

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix arrived back in Cyprus from Baghdad on Wednesday saying Iraqi officials had promised him full cooperation. He made a two-day trip to Iraq to launch preparations by weapons inspectors to resume the hunt for banned weapons suspended four years ago.

"We had good discussions with representatives of the Iraqi government and (they) assured us they will fully implement the resolution and co-operate with us, so it was a constructive visit," Blix told reporters in Larnaca.

Iraqi newspapers said on Wednesday the inspectors would soon verify that Iraq had no such weapons and the United Nations should lift sanctions imposed after the 1991 Gulf War.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 requires Baghdad to grant inspectors unfettered access to suspect sites. Washington was anxious on Wednesday to remind Iraq the threat of attack, if it does not comply, is real.

US officials said they were asking some 50 governments for material help, including "combat forces, logistics, humanitarian aid and rebuilding (Iraq) afterward".

British Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon said Britain had received a US request for troops and would offer a "credible threat", but stressed that did not mean war was inevitable.

Britain, Washington's staunch ally, is widely expected to contribute around 15,000 soldiers.

The US Central Command said Western warplanes bombed targets in southern Iraq on Wednesday morning.

"Today's strike came after Iraqi air defences fired surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery at coalition aircraft," it said.

The last strike on the southern "no-fly" zone was on Monday. US and British warplanes patrol "no-fly" zones over southern and northern Iraq created after the 1991 Gulf War to protect Shi'ites and Kurds from Iraqi government troops.

They are not recognised by Baghdad, which routinely describes bombing incidents as attacks on civilians.

US officials have said that continued firing by Iraqi anti-aircraft forces at the patrolling jets is a direct violation of the November 8 UN resolution on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction -- a view not shared by most other governments.

Under that resolution, the first big test for Iraq is the December 8 deadline for it to submit a full account of all banned weapons programmes.

Iraqi presidential adviser General Amir al-Saadi told reporters after meeting Blix that deadline would be met and a "report from Iraq will be submitted on all the files -- nuclear, chemical, biological and missile files".

Asked if the inspectors would have unfettered access to all sites in Iraq, Saadi said: "Yes, that is as stipulated in the resolution and as we have agreed with them."

Vice-President Taha Yassin Ramadan later said there would be no problems if inspectors worked "professionally", but added:

"Yet if it acts as it pleases and in accord with the Zionist American administration's intentions, then yes this resolution gives it a legal cover, as they say, for heinous acts."

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said Iraq's cooperation had averted war. Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan al-Muasher, speaking at an Arab League meeting in Damascus, said the threat had not disappeared entirely.

Exiled Iraqi opposition groups asked the British government on Wednesday for permission to hold a meeting in London in December to discuss how their country would be governed if Saddam was ousted.

Previous attempts to set up a conference in Amsterdam or Brussels have foundered as a split widened between Ahmad Chalabi, the exile with the best connections in Washington, and his Islamist and Kurdish opponents in the opposition.

A UN official expressed "grave concern" on Wednesday over lagging Iraqi oil sales that are eating into the funding available to the UN humanitarian programme for Iraq.

Baghdad's crude oil exports have dropped sharply over a dispute on oil pricing policy in the UN Security Council committee that monitors UN sanctions on Iraq.

- REUTERS

Further reading
Feature: War with Iraq

Iraq links and resources