LONDON: About 70 former Iraqi military officers will gather in London next week for the biggest dissident meeting yet to discuss the overthrow of the Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein.

The gathering will follow crucial two-day talks opening in Vienna on Thursday between the UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, and the Iraqi foreign minister, Naji Sabri, to negotiate the return of UN weapons inspectors to Iraq.

Failure by Iraq to allow the weapons inspectors back would provide the US with an excuse to take action against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The US administration is looking at various options for the removal of Saddam, ranging from a full-scale invasion next year involving 200,000 troops, most of them American, to a CIA assassination attempt.

But the preference, if possible, is for the Iraqi military to stage a coup. The US hope is that some of the former Iraqi officers retain links with brother officers still in Iraq.

The London conference is being organised by former Brigadier Tawfiq Al Yassiri, who took part in an uprising in the Babylon region south of Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War. He was wounded and taken first to Saudi Arabia, and then to London.

Four years ago he set up the Iraqi National Coalition, an umbrella group of former officers. The co-organizer of the conference is former General Saad Ubeidi, who was the Iraqi army’s head of psychological operations.

The three-day conference, which will be attended by former Iraqi soldiers living in exile in the US and Europe, will discuss ways of mobilizing military efforts in support of political opposition to Saddam.

An Iraqi political exile said on Wednesday, that if the officers decided to draw up an “operational plan” for bringing down Saddam Hussein, this would be likely to be discussed in private.

A similar meeting was scheduled to be held in Washington in April, but has been postponed twice.

The Vienna meeting is the third since March between Annan and an Iraqi delegation. It has been billed as a make-or-break session, but British sources said that it would be up to Annan to decide when the diplomatic option had been exhausted.

The UN and Iraq hinted before the last meeting that they were on the verge of a breakthrough, but the mood has since become less hopeful.

UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998, complaining that President Saddam had been hindering their search for weapons of mass destruction.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.