March 25, 2003	Tuesday	Muharram 21, 1424

LONDON, March 24: The voice, the face, the manner were vintage Saddam Hussein — but experts say Monday’s broadcast by the Iraqi leader gave no concrete proof as to whether he is alive or dead.

Most believed it showed the Iraqi president in robust form.

As evidence, they cited the look, sound and swagger of a man who favours florid rhetoric to rally his people and heap scorn on the “evil ones” bent on conquering “the sacred land” of Iraq.

But President Saddam’s principal enemies in the five-day-old war — the United States and Britain — cast doubt on the Iraqi leader’s apparent health and commanding presence.

“What I can say straight away is that those pictures were not live,” said British Defence Minister Geoff Hoon.

“We are well aware that he spent many hours recently tape-recording various messages. We have to do a little more analysis of what he was actually saying to see whether or not that in fact was Saddam Hussein,” Hoon told reporters.

In Washington, there were similar doubts.

“It would not be a surprise if Saddam Hussein had some time ago put in the can numerous statements designed to be released later,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.

Another US official said American intelligence agencies believed the tape could be a bluff. “He seems to be making reference to some units which haven’t even engaged in battle. They’re assuming it was him, but the question is ‘when’.”

Even if it was Saddam as most analysts think — this was his second such broadcast of the war — London and Washington say it shows nothing about his grip on Iraq’s power structure.

Not since US-led forces tried to kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 2001 has there been such rampant media speculation on the whereabouts of one man.

“One hundred percent it is Saddam Hussein,” said an activist whose latest of many meetings with Saddam was last month.

“This is his accent, these are his words, this is his speech and his style,” the Lebanese activist told Reuters in Beirut. “This is his way. This is him without hesitation.”

Saddam, well-versed in the sort of psychological warfare that comes with combat, will have known full well that such a broadcast would dim speculation that he had been killed or wounded in early US air raids.

He even made mention of ongoing battle sites, bolstering the tape’s credibility, but military experts said the place names bandied around would have been obvious locations for conflict before the first shot of war was even fired.

The US-British allies, too, would know that fanning rumours about his fate could either force Saddam to emerge from cover, enabling forces to take a new shot at him, or else unsettle his top commanders into an early surrender.

“We’re in the middle of a fairly intense psy-ops campaign.. The whole American strategic plan is based on triggering a coup so they don’t have to fight in Baghdad,” Toby Dodge, an Iraq expert at Warwick University in England, said.—Reuters