US President George W. Bush warned Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein this evening that his "day of reckoning is coming," saying there was little evidence he would disarm peacefully.
"For 11 long years the world has dealt with him, and now he's got to understand his day of reckoning is coming and therefore he must disarm voluntarily," Mr Bush told reporters at his Crawford, Texas, ranch. "Saddam Hussein, hopefully he realizes we're serious."
Mr Bush spoke as more than 11,000 American troops prepared to head for the Gulf amid US preparations for a possible invasion of Iraq and Iraq's deputy prime minister accused Washington of planning to invade Iraq despite an absence of weapons of mass destruction.
On the diplomatic front, an Iranian newspaper reported what it said was a US-Russian plan to persuade Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to hand over power and go to Moscow. The Russian Foreign Ministry declined comment.
A group of Arab intellectuals said they planned to appeal to the Arab world to pressure Saddam to step down to avert a war.
US defence officials said the deployment of the desert-trained 3rd Infantry Division would be the first of a full combat division to the Gulf since the 1991 Gulf War.
Other units are also on notice to move and their arrival would double the nearly 60,000 US personnel already in the region. Military analysts say the US invasion plans are likely to involve as many as 250,000 troops.
President Bush says he has made no decision on whether to invade Iraq, which was ordered by the UN Security Council in November to disarm or face serious consequences.
Iraq's deputy prime minister, Mr Tareq Aziz, accused Washington of planning to invade his country, regardless of what UN arms inspectors turn up, as part of a plan to control the region's oil supplies.
"They didn't say 'let us wait for a while for the result of the inspection and then let's decide what to do'," Mr Aziz told several groups of European activists in Baghdad to show their opposition to war on Iraq.
"When they continue their preparations for the war of aggression, what does that mean? It doesn't mean that they are genuinely afraid of an imaginary Iraqi threat. It means that they have an imperialist design," he said.
"That design is to invade Iraq, to occupy Iraq and use the national resources of Iraq for the purposes of...the American capitalist regime," he said.
"When America becomes stronger economically, when America takes over the whole oil of the region and puts it in its hands it is going to pressure politically and economically every country that needs oil," Mr Aziz said.
World oil prices opened the year higher, but this was primarily because a Venezuelan strike pushed US stocks close to a 26-year low.
Analysts said the possibility of war in Iraq was likely to push gold higher, and the dollar was slightly higher at $1.0465 to the euro but was held back by uncertainty over an Iraq war and the US economic recovery.