President Clinton, yesterday called for "strong and unambiguous action" against President Saddam Hussein of Iraq to force him to comply with UN weapons inspections. Mr Clinton said he was keeping all his options open including military intervention. "I don't want to rule anything in or out. At a moment like this it's very important that a president maintain all options and signal none. And that's where I want to be," he said on NBC television.
Mr Clinton and his Secretary of State, Ms Madeleine Albright, both warned Baghdad against carrying out a threat to shoot down a US spy plane monitoring Iraqi weapons programmes as part of the UN mission. The flights were suspended last week but are due to resume today.
The White House also rejected Iraqi demands to revamp the commission. Mr Clinton's National Security adviser, Mr Sandy Berger, responded with a blunt "no" when asked if Mr Saddam's demands to remove US weapons inspectors from the UN Special Commission (Unscom) were acceptable.
"It is up to Mr [Richard] Butler, who is now the [Unscom] chairman, to run these teams. He runs them in a totally professional and apolitical way," Mr Berger said. "It is not for Saddam Hussein to dictate." The UN Security Council meets today in New York following the failed mission of three UN envoys sent to Iraq last week to defuse the crisis. A UN economic embargo imposed on Iraq in 1990 will only be lifted when UN weapons inspectors rule that Baghdad is free of weapons of mass destruction. For the seventh day running weapons inspectors were barred yesterday from carrying out their work.
Both France and Russia have indicated that they would not support military action against Iraq. However the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, yesterday wrote to Mr Clinton, telling him Britain was firmly behind the US in the dispute.
In Baghdad, Mr Saddam said Iraq was faced with the choice of an "honourable life, or a confrontation and everything that follows". The Iraqi president was speaking at a meeting of the Revolutionary Command Council of the ruling Baath party specially convened to review the crisis.
Heavy fighting involving Iraqi and Turkish Kurdish factions and Turkish forces raged in northern Iraq yesterday for the second day running, according to a spokesman for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of two rival factions involved. He said the Turkish army was continuing to provide air and heavy artillery support as well as armoured personnel carriers to the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Ankara denies the charge. It says its forces in northern Iraq are conducting a "limited operation" targeted only at units of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a mainly Turkish Kurdish faction it says is using PUK-held areas a base for attacks on Turkey. --(AFP)