Defiant Saddam vows to rout any US invasion

A defiant Saddam Hussein rallied Iraqis on the 12th anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War yesterday with a vow to rout US troops at the gates of Baghdad.

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.

Saddam's speech, marking the anniversary of the start of the Gulf War that drove Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, 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 the warheads had not been declared by Iraq, clear evidence that Saddam was not disarming as required under a tough new UN resolution passed last November.

UN weapons chief Hans Blix adopted a softer stance, saying the find was no "smoking gun", or 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.

Saddam made no mention of the discovery in his speech urging Iraqis to be alert for a US strike.

"We have determined and planned to defeat the aggressors. We have mobilised our abilities, including those of the army, people and leadership," Saddam said in a televised speech.

"Baghdad, its people and leadership, is determined to force the Mongols of our age to commit suicide at its gates," he said, referring to the Mongol armies who sacked Baghdad, then a centre of learning, in 1258.

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 27.

Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the UN's nuclear watchdog, toured Paris and London to brief the two veto-wielding members of the UN Security Council on the arms inspectors' hunt for chemical, biological and ballistic weapons in Iraq.

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.

Blix and ElBaradei have said they would confront Iraqi officials in talks in Baghdad tomorrow and Monday with big gaps in the 12,000-page weapons declaration Iraq submitted to the United Nations on December 7.

ElBaradei said Baghdad had to be proactive in showing it had no weapons of mass destruction. "That is the clear message we are sending to Baghdad next week: cooperate and there is a positive outcome for you, and if you do not, unfortunately the consequences will not be very pleasant."

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, seen as a moderate in the Bush administration, said in a Spanish newspaper interview yesterday that Iraq was "tricking the inspectors and blocking their work".

British officials said there should be "no rush to judgement" over Thursday's 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," Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies, told Reuters.

On the diplomatic front, Turkey's president said his country could only make a limited contribution to any US-led war on its southern neighbour. Ankara opposes a war on Iraq and has been slow to offer use of its bases requested by Washington.

In neighbouring Syria, Saddam's special envoy began a regional tour with talks with President Bashar al-Assad, after Iraqi visits to Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco over the past week.

Arab officials said reports floated in the media and diplomatic circles that Saddam might step down were part of a US-led campaign of psychological warfare to undermine Saddam's will to fight and encourge a coup d'etat against him.

Thousands of anti-war protesters took to the streets in Cairo, Bahrain and Gaza City.