Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the only Arab leader not to have condemned the terror attacks in the US, advised Washington Saturday to refrain from using force in retaliation for the unprecedented jetliner suicide bombings.
"The United States needs common sense and not force," Saddam said in an open letter addressed to the peoples and governments of the United States and other Western countries.
The Iraqi leader was referring to US threats of military retaliation, presumably against Afghanistan, which hosts Saudi-born Islamist dissident Osama bin Laden, Washington's prime suspect in the September 11 attacks against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington.
Departing from his customary diatribes against the United States, his sworn enemy since the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqi leader urged Americans and other Westerners to "encourage their rulers to demonstrate fairness and perform their duties in accordance with what is right."
Saddam, who has so far defied worldwide condemnation of last Tuesday's attacks, conceded Saturday that "what happened in the United States was neither normal nor minor."
Saddam's remarks last Wednesday that Americans were "reaping the thorns sown by their rulers in the world" earned him stinging criticism from US Secretary of State Colin Powell.
"I'm not surprised," Powell said on Thursday. "He [Saddam] is one of the leading terrorists on the face of the earth and I would not expect the slightest drop of milk of human kindness to be flowing in his veins."
Iraq did not endorse the devastating attacks, and its Moscow embassy Thursday "categorically denied" that Baghdad was involved in the atrocities, saying it was responding to "slanders" in the Western media.
"The United States and the West have gone to extremes in using force, and they have now realized that force has not achieved what they wanted," Saddam said Saturday in a reference to the Gulf War, in which a US-led international coalition expelled his troops from Kuwait.
"Could not their leaders, for once, try to exercise common sense so that their peoples and the world live in peace and security?" he asked.
Saddam denounced what he called the "extreme fanaticism" which the United States and other Western countries were displaying by threatening to carry out "a military aggression against an Islamic state ... on the basis of an accusation that has yet to be proven."
The tone was much the same in Iraq's state-controlled press Saturday.
"The US government is reacting in an unbalanced and impulsive manner," said the daily al-Iraq, warning that "its behavior might spark a war, or even wars."
US leaders, including President George W. Bush, were demonstrating "political stupidity," al-Iraq said.
The newspaper Babel, which is run by Saddam's elder son Uday, detected an Israeli hand in the New York and Washington attacks.
"We can state that the Zionists were involved in what took place, and that they planned it, because the Zionist entity [Israel] is the sole beneficiary" from the attacks, the paper maintained.
To prove its point, Babel pointed out that the attacks "coincided" with Israeli moves to "reoccupy areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority" in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- BAGHDAD (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
