November 21, 2002	Thursday	Ramazan 15, 1423

PRAGUE/BAGHDAD, Nov 20: US President George Bush warned Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday that if he continued to deny having weapons of mass destruction he would enter his “final stage” as Iraq’s leader.

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

Saddam’s government promised to comply with UN demands that it submit a full inventory of its weapons of mass destruction by Dec 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.

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 cooperate 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.—Reuters