PARIS, March 13: Lebanon’s former president Amin Gemayel, who has been charged with a mission of attempting to convince Saddam Hussein to step down from power as the only way of avoid a US attack against Iraq, has just returned from a second visit to Baghdad where he observed that “the situation is desperate, nobody — neither Saddam nor the Americans — wants to budge an inch.”

Still, he said on Wednesday to a French journalist who met with him at Amman airport in Jordan — where he was changing planes for a flight home to Beirut — “we must hope that something will happen in the eleventh hour.”

Saddam had hoped that such a last-minute agreement might have taken the form of an accord allowing his son, Qoussai, to replace him, at least temporarily, but, suggests Mr Gemayel, his US interlocutors seem adamant about not accepting a continuity with the past.

“What they want,” said Mr Gemayel about the US position, “is not that one dictator replace another, they want a complete change, which is precisely what Saddam refuses.”