LONDON, 12 August — Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has promised a British lawmaker that he will give weapons inspectors access to his country, but the British government dismissed the reported offer.
The Mail on Sunday said George Galloway, a member of Parliament from Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour Party, had met the Iraqi leader at a secret underground bunker near Baghdad. Saddam announced "he would implement all UN resolutions on Iraq and admit weapons inspectors without hindrance", the paper said, although it did not quote the pledge directly.
It said Saddam had asked for better ties with Britain. "We don’t know why you turned against us more than any other European country," it quoted Saddam as saying.
But Saddam also echoed Winston Churchill to warn that if Western countries invade Iraq, "we will fight on the streets, on the rooftops, from house to house, we will never surrender".
Commenting on the reported offer, a British Foreign Office spokesman said: "This changes nothing. Saddam Hussein knows clearly what he has to do and that is comply with UN Security Council resolutions. The ball is in his court."
Prime Minister Tony Blair is interrupting his holiday today to meet French counterpart Jean-Pierre Raffarin in an attempt to heal the rift between Britain and the rest of Europe over war with Iraq. The unscheduled talks in Le Vernet, the town in southern France where Blair is staying, come amid a widening split on the issue between Britain and her European partners, reports of disagreements between Blair and Chancellor Gordon Brown and Saddam’s "offer "to allow United Nations inspectors to return.
The informal meeting between the two prime ministers comes as an opinion poll shows that three out of four French citizens would oppose the involvement of the country’s armed forces in a military attack against Iraq.
Across the Atlantic, leading Republican senators said President George W. Bush can justify a US attack on Iraq while a top Iraqi dissident said after talks with US officials that he is both "encouraged" by Washington’s resolve to oust Saddam and commitment to a democratic, multiethnic Iraq. "We had a clear message that the United States is determined to implement its policy of a regime change in Iraq, but also that it shared our vision for a free, democratic Iraq that lived in peace and harmony with its neighbors," Sharif Ali ibn Al-Hussein of the Constitutional Monarchy Movement told NBC television’s "Weekend Today" show.
Hussein was among representatives of six Iraqi opposition groups, who had a teleconference with US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney on Saturday.
Meanwhile. leading Republican senators contended that Bush was able to make the case for a preemptive attack on Iraq. Disputing a growing number of calls by lawmakers, including some from within Bush’s own Republican Party in recent days, Senators Richard Lugar and Fred Thompson said Bush already had ample reason to act against Saddam.
US House of Representatives Majority Leader Dick Armey, a Texas Republican, caused a stir last week when he broke ranks with Bush in suggesting the United States had no business attacking the Gulf nation without sufficient provocation. Democratic Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, yesterday joined Armey and the others urging against such an attack on Iraq, telling NBC’s "Meet the Press" Saddam posed no serious danger to the US. (The Independent)
