Report: Saudis Urge Saddam To Exit

A Saudi official secretly visited Baghdad last month to see if Saddam Hussein would go into exile to avoid a devastating war, according to a published report.

The clandestine diplomatic foray was only the latest sign of a desire by some Arab states to prevent a war by getting Saddam to leave office, the Christian Science Monitor reports.

A group of Arab intellectuals has made a similar pitch, while a Turkish official this week offered to mediate any exile move. News reports in August told of a similar mission by a Qatari official.

Quoting Arab diplomatic sources, the Monitor reports that there is little optimism the efforts will pay off. Countries where Saddam might seek refuge include Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iran, Russia and Belarus, the paper said.

The Bush administration has said it supports the efforts but is not seeking such a solution.

"I would merely repeat today that were Saddam to take the option to leave and to allow people to run his country who would be willing to live in peace with their neighbors and their own people, that that would be a positive development," said State Department Spokesman Richard Boucher in a Monday briefing. "But we're not behind those proposals."

The United States accuses Iraq of stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and says it will use force if necessary to disarm the Arab nation. Iraq denies the charges.

There have been no known instances of serious problems encountered by the inspectors since they began work Nov. 27.

The biggest dispute between the Iraqi government and the inspectors concerns Iraq's dossier of written answers to inspectors' questions.

According to U.N. officials and an Associated Press review of the Iraqi dossier, that declaration fails to provide new answers to key questions on stocks of biological agents such as anthrax, the nutrients used in their production and the means to deliver them.

In response to many of the questions, the Iraqis enclosed photocopies of 4- and 5-year-old answers long considered insufficient by inspectors.

The AP reviewed Iraq's 1996 biological declaration and the 2002 dossier and found them to be virtually identical although the new report includes information Iraq provided in 1997 and 1998 in response to inspectors' questions. Neither report has been made public.

Earlier teams of inspectors said that in those reports, Iraq had failed to account for thousands of pounds of nutrients needed to produce anthrax, as well as materials used in the production of mustard gas and aflotoxin.

Iraq claims that it has destroyed all records of any tests it conducted with biological weapons.

Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, has said he plans to confront the Iraqis about unanswered questions in Baghdad next week.

On Wednesday, the inspectors visited eight sites, including three cement factories and a missile fuel factory, all south of the capital.

Also Wednesday, a key Iraqi official accused the inspectors of engaging in espionage and charged that the United States is planning for war even though Saddam is cooperating with Security Council resolutions.

"They are searching for other information, information about Iraqi conventional military capability, information about the Iraqi scientific and industrial capability in civilian area and also espionage questions," Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said.

"In spite of the fact that the inspectors are here and they are doing their job and Iraq is fully cooperating with them (inspectors), preparations for war (are) going on," he said.

U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki said U.N. officials had received no formal complaint about alleged espionage and had noticed no change in cooperation from Iraqi officials.

"The inspectors are not spies. They are international civil servants," Ueki said.

The accusations echoed similar comments by Saddam earlier in the week, and Iraqi objections during the first round of inspections that ended in 1998. In the late 1990s, U.S. newspapers reported there was some evidence that the U.S. government had received intelligence information through the weapons inspections teams.

Former U.N. weapons inspector and CBS News analyst Tim McCarthy says his team never found what it was looking for.

"We never were really able to locate, on our own, an intact weapon… a 'bomb in the basement,'" he said. But he says he felt that the team was "on the cusp" of such a discovery just before Saddam Hussein kicked them out of Iraq in 1998.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that while that war with Iraq "clearly is not inevitable," the American troop buildup in the Gulf would continue.

In a significant move, the American battle staff that would run a military campaign against Iraq is beginning to assemble at a command post in the small Gulf state of Qatar.

The officials stressed that the move to Qatar does not mean war is imminent or inevitable, but it was one of several signs this week that preparations for war were underway. Troop deployments have been announced and reservists called up and a hospital ship has left for the Gulf

More elements of a possible invasion force could head to Iraq shortly. Among the forces expected to deploy from U.S. bases in the next several days are F-15E and F-15C fighters and B-1B bombers.

Britain Tuesday ordered a task force of ships and 3,000 Royal Marines to head toward the Gulf to confront Iraq "if and as required" and announced the call-up of 1,500 reserve soldiers. French President Jacques Chirac told his nation's soldiers to be ready for possible conflict.

Iraq said Wednesday that two people were killed and 13 injured when U.S. and British warplanes bombed what it called civilian installations in the south of the country.