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BAGHDAD, March 17: Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri rejected Monday a US ultimatum for President Saddam Hussein to leave the country or face war.
“The only option (to avoid war) is the departure of the number one warmonger in the world, US President George W. Bush,” Sabri told reporters.
Sabri hit out at “the failing President Bush who made his country a joke in the world and isolated his administration.”
Iraq’s ambassador to the United Nations Mohammed Aldouri said Baghdad’s main priority following the withdrawal of UN weapons inspectors “is to prepare for war.”
“Our duty now is to prepare ourselves to defend our country,” Aldouri said after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan announced that he had ordered UN staff to leave Iraq.
In a last-ditch bid to avert war, Iraq has provided a new list of 130 scientists involved in past chemical weapons programmes, sent a dossier on VX nerve gas to the United Nations and a similar file on anthrax has been promised for this week.
Information Minister Mohamad Said al-Sahhaf denounced the US-British-Spanish “summit of outlaws” in Portugal’s Azores islands on Sunday for failing to justify the use of force.
“They are a few, three states whose officials have drowned the world with lies and did not present any proof” for their claims that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction, he told reporters.
OIL PRODUCTION: Iraqi Trade Minister Mohammad Mahdi Saleh said on Monday that his country had not yet decided to halt oil production, .
“Until now, there is no decision to halt oil production,” he told reporters.
Iraq sits on the world’s second largest crude reserves but has been under UN sanctions since 1990 and can only export oil under UN supervision as part of a so-called oil-for-food program.
The program is about to be suspended following UN chief Kofi Annan’s decision to order the evacuation of the UN staff that runs it ahead of the anticipated US campaign.
Iraq currently has an output capacity of some 2.8 million barrels per day (bpd), of which some two million bpd are exported under the program.
FRANCE: French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Monday that France regretted the decision by the United States and its allies to abandon diplomacy over Iraq.
“Despite the clearly expressed will of the international community, the United States, Great Britain and Spain are today underlining their determination to resort to force,” Mr Villepin said in a statement.—AFP/Reuters
