A defiant Saddam Hussein rallied Iraqis on the 12th anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War with a vow to rout US troops at the gates of Baghdad. Saddam made the defiant speech as the US, the United Nations, France and Britain all played down the discovery of empty rocket warheads in by arms inspectors yesterday.
The Iraqi president said he had mobilised his army and drawn up a plan to counter any invasion by the tens of thousands of US soldiers, warplanes and ships now massing in the Gulf.
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Saddam's speech, marking the anniversary of the start of the Gulf War, came a day after UN inspectors in Iraq said they had found empty rocket warheads designed to carry chemical warfare agents.
The White House called the discovery "troubling and serious" and said because the warheads had not been declared by Iraq in their recent dossier to the United Nations, it was clear evidence that Saddam was not disarming as required under UN resolution 1441 passed last November.
UN chief weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix adopted a softer stance, saying the find was not a "smoking gun", nor key evidence that could trigger a US-led invasion.
"This discovery is interesting and obviously the warheads have to be destroyed ... But it's not something that's so important because we're talking about empty warheads," he told a news conference in Paris.
Iraq says they were obsolete stock that had been forgotten about.
As the US continued its buildup of forces in the Gulf, French President Jacques Chirac warned that any unilateral action against Iraq would contravene international law. He said it was up to the UN Security Council to decide on the inspectors' progress report, due to be presented on January 27th.
Dr Blix and Dr Mohamed El-Baradei, head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, visited Paris and London to brief the two members of the UN Security Council.
Dr Blix said he was not yet sure that Iraq had destroyed all its banned weapons. "There is not yet confidence... that all the chemical and biological weapons and missiles are gone and that all the equipment is gone," he said. In the US Secretary of State Colin Powell, told a Spanish newspaper Friday that Iraq was "tricking the inspectors and blocking their work".
But British officials said there should be "no rush to judgement" over the discovery, while Russia said the find underlined the effectiveness of the inspections.
Weapons experts said the 122mm rocket casings found in ammunition bunkers were from a multiple-barrelled rocket launcher system, a battlefield artillery weapon that could not be considered a weapon of mass destruction.
"It would make no sense to hide them in a place ... where the inspectors are sure to look. For once the Iraqis are probably telling the truth," Mr Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, said.