PARIS, March 12: “Be forewarned,” Libyan head of state Muammar Qadhafi tells US President George W Bush in an exclusive front page interview on Tuesday morning’s issue of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, “that if you go through with your attack of Iraq, you’ll only make Osama bin Laden that much stronger, for the only interests you’ll be serving are neither yours nor ours, but his.”

The Libyan president also warns President Bush that “your victory will be short-lived, because it will bring about in its wake a chain of reactions, and terrorism (as we know it) will take on the proportions of a plague. You’re playing with a keg of powder that is ready to explode.”

The Libyan strongman also says he’s convinced that Iraq is only the first of several other attacks being prepared against other Gulf, North African and Middle Eastern states: “Bush certainly won’t wait long to turn Iran, Saudi Arabia and Libya into targets too. And if this is the case, certainly America’s policy will have lost all its ambiguity and we’ll be faced with a new form of neo-colonialism.”