Iraq tells Arabs to strike at American aggressors

Iqaq has called on Arabs to strike back against "the aggressors", their property and their assets if America attacks Baghdad.

Stepping up the rhetoric, the Vice-President, Taha Yassin Ramadan, refrained from mentioning the United States by name. But, speaking after talks in Jordan, he said: "It is the right of all the Arab people, wherever they are, to fight against the aggression through their representatives and on their soil ... by all means."

Mr Ramadan added: "We call on all Arab and good people to confront the interests of the aggressors, their materials and humans wherever they are because this is a human right." He repeated the Iraqi view that any attack on Iraq would be "an aggression on all the Arab nation".

The Vice-President, who has been touring Arab states to bolster support for Iraq, rejected claims that Iraq was rebuilding its banned weapons stocks.

He scoffed at Monday's study by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which concluded that Iraq could build a nuclear bomb within months if it acquired enriched uranium with foreign help. "The same point could be made even of a poor country like Mauritania for example," he said.

The leading UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, confirmed yesterday that satellite imagery had shown new buildings at a suspect Iraqi nuclear site under surveillance by the International Atomic Energy Agency, "but this is not the same as saying there are weapons of mass destruction".

He said: "If I had solid evidence that Iraq retained weapons of mass destruction or were constructing such weapons I would take it to the Security Council – report to them," Mr Blix said.

But the American Vice-President, Dick Cheney, warned on television that if the world waited until the Iraqis had developed a nuclear bomb, it would be too late to act. "You think of those 30 countries that signed up for the coalition in the Gulf War, many of them will simply take a pass faced with that kind of problem. So time is not on our side," he said.

Mr Cheney also suggested that a promised dossier on the threat from Iraq's weapons would be censored because of security concerns. While the Bush administration would brief a small number of senior congressional leaders, "there has to be some kind of understanding that there's a limit beyond which we can't go without destroying our capacity to be able to know what's going on in a crucial, crucial area", he said.

Saudi Arabia joined European nations yesterday in insisting that any action against Iraq should be decided by the United Nations.

"The worry with military action is that the territorial integrity of Iraq would suffer," the Saudi Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, said after talks in Paris with the French President, Jacques Chirac, echoing a fear expressed by other Arab leaders. Mr Chirac is calling for the UN Security Council to give a three-week deadline to Iraq to readmit UN weapons inspectors. Failure would lead to a formal authorisation for military force.

The European Commission President, Romano Prodi, speaking on Portuguese radio yesterday, opposed unilateral US military action against Iraq and called on Washington to obtain UN support. "Otherwise I fear that the greatest achievement of all will be destroyed, the keystone of US diplomacy after 11 September, which is the global anti-terrorist alliance," Mr Prodi said.

Israel's chief of military intelligence was quoted as saying that a US attack was a "foregone conclusion" and was expected to take place soon. The report was denied by the Israeli government.