Iraq scraps missiles but US cries foul

Iraq began scrapping a second batch of banned missiles yesterday to try to halt the US march to war - only to have the United States dismiss its efforts as a "game of deception".

American military planners found themselves in a further quandary after the Turkish parliament refused on Saturday to let Washington use Turkish soil to open a second front against Iraq.

The Turkish decision and the destruction of weapons gave heart to critics of the US view that UN efforts to disarm Iraq peacefully have failed and made war necessary.

Arab leaders meeting in Cairo passed a resolution on Saturday saying they opposed an attack on Iraq as a threat to Arab national security - but not without an unprecedented demand from a fellow Arab nation, UAE, that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein should go into exile to spare the region war.

Bulldozers were at work yesterday destroying another six al-Samoud 2 missiles north of Baghdad under the eyes of UN inspectors who had ruled that they exceeded the 150-kilometre range permitted under a decade-old UN disarmament regime.

The first four missiles were scrapped on Saturday, crushed whole - engine, electronics and all - except for the warheads, which were to be dealt with later.

Dimitri Perricos, head of the inspection team, said the inspectors had wanted to blow up the missiles - "it is faster" - but had left the choice to the Iraqis.

The destruction of the whole stock of around 100 al-Samouds, Iraq's most advanced surface-to-surface missile, whose name means "steadfastness", was expected to take two weeks.

Later yesterday, inspectors were due to hold talks with Iraqi officials on ways to provide long-sought proof of Baghdad's assertion that it long ago destroyed banned stocks of VX nerve gas and the germ warfare agent anthrax.

Inspectors also said they had interviewed a biological weapons scientist and a missile expert on Friday in private and without tape recorders, something they have long demanded as the only way to prevent intimidation by the government.

But Washington, whose threats of war and military build-up in the Gulf have yielded more disarmament in Iraq than over a decade of international economic sanctions, insists Iraq still has huge stores of weapons of mass destruction.

"Resolution 1441 called for a complete, total and immediate disarmament. It did not call for pieces of disarmament," White House spokeswoman Mercy Viana said on Saturday. "The president has always predicted that Iraq would destroy its al-Samoud missiles as part of their game of deception."

The United States and Britain have presented a draft UN Security Council resolution that opens the way to war.

The two countries are likely to seek UN endorsement for the war in the form of a resolution by the Security Council in New York in the days after chief weapons inspector Hans Blix presents his latest report next Friday.

Blix has hailed the scrapping of the al-Samoud missiles as "a significant piece of real disarmament", something that will not help Washington and London in what has become a furious campaign to win over at least five of perhaps 11 doubters on the 15-member Council.

They must also avoid a veto by two of the leading opponents of war, France and Russia. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin told BBC Television: "Do we need a second resolution? No. Are we going to oppose a second resolution? Yes, as are the Russians and many other countries."

One of the doubters is Pakistan, where about 70,000 marched through Karachi in the biggest anti-US protest in years.

In the Arab world, opposition to war is nearly universal - 300,000 people protested in the Yemeni capital Sanaa on Saturday - and the Arab leaders in Cairo insisted in a final resolution that their countries would not take part in any war.

But Gulf states such as Qatar and Kuwait are already playing host to the American forces massing to invade Iraq and another, the United Arab Emirates, became the first Arab state to make a public call for Saddam to step down, to avert war.

In Saudi Arabia - hosting US fighter planes enforcing a "no-fly zone" over southern Iraq - an American pilot said an Iraqi MiG-25 fighter has sneaked into Saudi airspace last Thursday to probe American reactions.

"He wisely turned around when we gave him a good hard radar lock... We were two minutes away from firing an air-to-air missile in his direction," said Lieutenant Colonel Matt Molloy.