LONDON, Feb 5: Iraqis are stoical in the face of potential war and will rally round President Saddam Hussein if bombs start falling, according to a radical British politician and peace activist who conducted a rare interview with the Iraqi leader.

“They may not want Saddam but at the moment there’s no hope whatsoever of democracy while you kill their people and threaten to obliterate the country,” veteran leftwinger Tony Benn, 77, said on Wednesday after his weekend visit to Iraq.

Calling Western sanctions “weapons of mass destruction” that had already killed more than one million Iraqis “in a deliberate policy of starvation,” Benn said military action would strengthen Saddam’s position among his people.

“If you bomb them — as we have done now for five years almost every night north and south — people are going to rally round the leader just as people did in Britain in 1940,” he said, referring to support across the political spectrum for UK leader Winston Churchill during World War Two.

Washington and London flatly disagree with that interpretation, saying Iraqis despise and fear Saddam and would rise against him given half a chance.

Benn said his short visit to Baghdad — during which he recorded an interview with Saddam that was broadcast on Tuesday in Britain — had shown him Iraqis were calm despite the buildup of British and U.S. forces on their doorstep.

“Iraqis as a whole are quite self-confident. They have a civilization that goes back 7,000 years and they regard the British and the Americans not exactly as barbarians because they like Britain very much, but as not very experienced,” he said.—Reuters