Baghdad fought back in the highly charged propaganda battle with the US and Britain yesterday by inviting its arch-enemy, the CIA, to enter Iraq and track down the country’s elusive weapons of mass destruction.
The Iraqi offer of unhindered access to US intelligence agents came after intensive pressure from Washington that made war early in the new year appear almost inevitable.
After four days of diplomatic pounding, Iraq hit back yesterday, accusing the Bush administration of rehashing old lies.
”We have told the world we are not producing these kind of weapons, but it seems that the world is drugged, absent or in a weak position,” President Saddam Hussein said.
At a press conference in Baghdad yesterday, General Amir al-Sadi, scientific adviser to the president, issued a challenge to the US and British intelligence to offer up hard evidence that Iraq has any biological, chemical or nuclear weapons.
”We do not even have any objections if the CIA sent somebody with the inspectors to show them the suspected sites,” Gen Sadi said.
This marks a major turnaround. Until yesterday, Iraq had objected to the possibility of US or other Western spies infiltrating the UN weapons teams.
Baghdad said, rightly, that the inspections team that left Iraq in 1998 had been infiltrated by intelligence agents and, in the intervening four years, repeatedly cited this as a reason why it objected to the return of the UN inspectors.
A CIA spokesman said yesterday that he did not want to comment on Baghdad’s offer.
Both the US and Britain claim, against Iraqi denials, that they have evidence that Iraq has continued to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The UN chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said at the end of last week that if the US and Britain had such evidence, they should hand it over.
US officials said at the weekend that they have been handing over intelligence and will provide more specific information to the inspectors over the next fortnight.
The Foreign Office made a similar promise yesterday: ”The weapons inspectors will get all the help they need to carry out their job in Iraq.”
But it emerged that British intelligence is reluctant to hand over everything it claims to have, insisting there is a danger that sources could be compromised.
British government officials have already privately admitted that they do not have any ”killer evidence” about weapons of mass destruction. If they had, they would have already passed it to the inspectors.
Babil, the Iraqi government newspaper run by president Saddam’s son, Uday, said in a front-page editorial yesterday: ”Everybody knows that if they had concrete information, they would have put it on television all around the world before giving it to the inspection teams.”
Gen Sadi accused the US and Britain of rushing to judge Iraq’s weapons programmes.
He claimed that objections raised by the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, to Iraq’s declaration on weapons of mass destruction, were a rehash of old information that had already been dealt with.
But US officials said yesterday the accusation made by Washington last week that Iraq was in material breach of a UN resolution on disarmament had come from specific information it has obtained and not from the declaration.
This new information, they said, was based on satellite pictures that showed construction at sites that had previously been bombed by US-led forces.
They also claimed to have fresh information based on records of suspicious dual-use material – that which has both a civilian and military function – procured by Iraq as part of a UN deal to relieve the suffering of Iraqis from sanctions.
British military chiefs are drawing up detailed plans in which thousands of Royal Marines would take part in a huge amphibious assault to seize the Iraqi port of Basra to control key strategic areas in south of the country.
The Ministry of Defence confirmed yesterday that HMS Ocean, Britain’s biggest helicopter and marine commando carrier, will be available to join a flotilla heading towards the Gulf next month after a major refit. – Guardian Unlimited Â