August 8, 2002	Thursday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 28,1423

JIDDAH, Aug 7: Saudi Arabia has made clear to Washington — publicly and privately — that the US military will not be allowed to use the kingdom’s soil in any way for an attack on Iraq, Foreign Minister Prince Saud said Wednesday.

Saudi Arabia, a longtime ally of Washington whose contribution to the US war on terrorism has been praised and sharply criticized by Americans, has no objections to the United States continuing its decade-old monitoring of Iraqi skies from the US air control centre in the kingdom, Saud said.

But as to using the centre or any Saudi soil to attack Iraq, he said in an interview with The Associated Press: “We have told them we don’t (want) them to use Saudi grounds.”

“We are against any attack on Iraq because we believe it is not needed, especially now that Iraq is moving to implement United Nations resolutions,” Saud said. “... For the government of Iraq, the leadership of Iraq, any change that happens there has to come from the Iraqi people. This is our attitude.”

Under UN Security Council resolutions, sanctions imposed after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which led to the Gulf War, cannot be lifted until UN inspectors certify that its biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons have been destroyed along with the long-range missiles to deliver them.

Last week, Iraq invited UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix to Baghdad for technical discussions that could lead to a resumption of the inspections, more than three years and a half after inspectors left Iraq and were barred from returning.

US President George W. Bush has said he is committed to a regime change in Iraq and war rhetoric is running high. Washington has dismissed the Blix invitation as a ploy.

Saudi Arabia invited US troops to the country for the 1991 Gulf War to help defend the oil-rich nation against Saddam Hussein’s forces. As speculation has grown Iraq would become the next US target in its war on terrorism, reports have said the Saudis were saying one thing in public, but privately telling US officials they would support a strike on Iraq.

Saud, speaking in English, denied that the private line to Washington was any different than the public remarks: “We couldn’t have made our position more clear, our leaders have said this and everybody responsible in the kingdom has said this.”

DEBATE INTENSIFIES: But it quoted two officials as saying that the military commanders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps along with the chairman and vice chairman of the chiefs agreed on moving militarily against Saddam.

Official U.S. policy for several years has been to seek a “regime change” in Iraq. Since the Sept 11 strikes in America, the U.S. government has intensified a debate over a possible attack on the oil-producing nation.

The debate has seen a string of media leaks designed to influence both public opinion and policymakers. Administration officials have vowed to crack down on the practice, even calling on the FBI to investigate possible breaches of national security.

“The chiefs have come over because they can read the handwriting on the wall,” the Times quoted an administration adviser as saying. “Now the senior leadership is on board.”

President George W. Bush said last week that “nothing’s changed” regarding the U.S. determination to topple Saddam and he pledged to use “all of the tools at our disposal” to deal with the Iraqi leader.

Defence Secretary Rumsfeld recently launched a Pentagon investigation into what he called a “criminal” leak to The New York Times of one of a number of military contingency plans for a possible invasion of Iraq.

Those plans, according to U.S. officials, vary from using upward of 250,000 American troops and hundreds of aircraft launched from countries in the region to much smaller numbers of troops in hopes that Iraqi military support for Saddam would quickly crumble.—AFP/ Reuters