DUBAI, March 7: Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s exile would be “an option” to avoid a US-led strike against Iraq, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said in an interview published Friday in the Arab newspaper Al-Hayat.

Annan also told the London-based daily that, while he wanted to resolve the crisis through peaceful means, he saw little point in travelling to Baghdad at this stage.

Exile “is one of the available options, but I am not sure whether President Saddam Hussein will abandon power ... or go into exile in another country.”

Asked if he intended to travel to the Iraqi capital, Annan said: “I believe in the need to do everything I can to find a peaceful solution to the crisis ... but I don’t see the usefulness (of a visit) at the present stage.”

More than 200,000 US and British forces are poised to attack Iraq over its alleged weapons of mass destruction, and US President George W. Bush warned late Thursday there was little time left for diplomacy.

Annan said that in case of war, the United Nations would have the task of ensuring emergency food supplies reach some 10 million Iraqis.

“We will then have to take care of two million refugees,” the UN chief warned. “The situation (in Iraq) is precarious.”

According to UN figures, five million Iraqis already have no access to clean drinking water and nearly one million children in the country suffer from chronic malnutrition.

In another interview with the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya news channel, Annan reiterated he had no immediate plans to visit Baghdad, but expressed concern that war in Iraq, coupled with a failure to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, would fuel extremism in the Middle East.

“If the conflict in Iraq were to come about we would have a situation of two conflicts in close proximity in the same region, with the public seeing the two images on television. And I cannot help but wonder if it will not radicalize further some of the people in the region,” he said.

“Inshallah (God willing),” Annan said when asked if in the event he went to Iraq that Saddam “might listen to you and accept to get the whole world out of this frenzy.”

According to a transcript, Annan said that while regime change in Baghdad was a declared US objective, it was “not the agenda” of what he described as a “quite divided” UN Security Council.

“I think the only issue before the council as a whole .. is the issue of disarmament of Iraq in accordance with UN resolutions,” he said.

“Yes ... the American government has indicated that it wants regime change and it wants to liberate Iraq and introduce democracy but that is not the agenda of the council,” the UN chief said.

But he warned that ongoing divisions might do away with the possibility of resolving the Iraq crisis peacefully.

“Even those countries that have been prepared to go to war have been stating that they would also — for example the UK says that it has not excluded that this can be resolved peacefully. But as the days go on and the divisions remain, we may lose that possibility,” he said.

Annan said that while the United Nations had done “very good and serious contingency planning on the humanitarian consequences” of a possible military showdown, it had done “very little” to prepare for a post-conflict Iraq.

“In the post-conflict administration of Iraq we have done very little. We have some preliminary thoughts, but we haven’t gone very far because this is something that we have not discussed with the council,” he said.

“What we did in Kosovo, East Timor and Afghanistan may not be entirely relevant in Iraq. Iraq has many trained people, administrators and technicians who I’m sure would play a role in their own country,” Annan said.

“If it were to come to a situation where one is looking at post-conflict Iraq then there’ll be lots of possibilities that will be open in the Iraqi situation that were not in other areas.”—AFP