IRAQ: Iraq has rejected as "lies and falsification" US President Bush's speech to the UN urging the world body to force Baghdad to disarm. "I will read Bush's speech paragraph by paragraph and I will refute lies and falsification in it on another occasion," Deputy Prime Minister Mr Tareq Aziz told reporters in Baghdad.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Mr Naji Sabri blasted Mr Bush's speech as "anti-Iraq propaganda".
Mr Sabri said in an interview on Greek television: "He \ rehashed a lot of anti-Iraq propaganda." Mr Sabri was dismissive of Mr Bush's demands that Baghdad end all support for terrorism, cease persecution of its civilian population, release or account for all Gulf War personnel whose fate is still unknown, and end all illicit trade outside the oil-for-food programme.
"These were accusations which the public opinion had heard for the last 12 years," Mr Sabri said.
A prominent Iraqi Muslim clergyman urged Muslims around the world to oppose Mr Bush's possible military action against Iraq.
"All Muslims should stand against oppression and aggression coming from America and Britain. The world starts to realise that America wants to impose its hegemony on the world," Abdul Razzaq al-Saadi said during Muslim Friday prayers in Baghdad.
On Mr Bush's accusation that Baghdad is developing weapons of mass destruction, Mr Sabri said: "These are lies, they have no evidence whatsoever that we have such weapons. The United States has failed to produce any evidence."
Speaking later on Dubai television, Mr Aziz claimed that letting UN arms inspectors back in to Iraq would not avert US military designs on Baghdad.
"We do not accept President Bush's conditions," Mr Aziz told the Dubai-based Arab satellite television station MBC.
"The return of inspectors without conditions will not solve the problem . . . we have had a bad experience with them. Is it clever to repeat an experience that failed and did not prevent aggression?" UN weapons inspectors responsible for accounting for Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and ballistic weapons were pulled out of Iraq in December 1998 on the eve of US and British bombing raids and have not been allowed to return.
"Is the great diplomacy they are talking about to delay US aggression four or five months and then for it to take place after the inspectors had returned?" Mr Aziz said.
The administration of President Bush is the most frightening in the history of the United States, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ms Jody Williams said yesterday, denouncing US unilateralism.
Ms Williams, the coordinator of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) who shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with her organisation, said Mr Bush's administration was "the scariest administration of the US history".
"He is worse than Reagan, worse than Nixon. He sees the world in black and white," the US activist told reporters in Oslo following the publication of a report on landmines. - (AFP)