BAGHDAD, June 26 (Reuters) - The newspaper run by President
Saddam Hussein's eldest son Uday on Wednesday denounced
President George W. Bush's Middle East policy speech as
trickery, and urged Arabs not to fall for it.
"Bush's cheating speech aims at curbing the Palestinian
armed resistance against the Zionists' (Israeli) occupation and
denying the Palestinians the right to live," Babel, Iraq's most
influential newspaper, said in a front-page editorial.
In a message read at the White House on Monday, Bush backed
the creation of a provisional Palestinian state and a final
settlement of the Middle East conflict in three years, but only
if Palestinians changed their leader and met other tough terms.
"After three years the Zionist entity (Israel) and its
partner, America, will come out with a new crisis in order to
tear down their earlier false promise (to establish a
Palestinian state)," Babel said.
"The so-called provisional Palestinian state initiated by
Bush is in fact a non-existent but only in the policy of
cheating that the West is practising against the Arabs," it
added.
Babel urged Arab rulers not to "kneel and surrender to or
accept" Bush's new Middle East peace plan.
Iraq and the United States are at loggerheads over weapons
of mass destruction that Washington accuses Baghdad of
developing in recent years.
Bush has openly declared his desire to remove Saddam by
military force if necessary, but he has offered few details of
how he plans to accomplish that.
Bush, according to a Washington Post report issued in mid-
June, had signed an order earlier this year directing the
Central Intelligence Agency to conduct covert operations to
topple Saddam.
Iraq has always taken a hard line towards Israel. It fired
Scud missiles at the Jewish state during the 1991 Gulf War. It
also opposes interim land-for-peace accords between Israel and
the Palestinians and those signed between Israel and other
neighbouring countries.
((Hassan Hafidh, Baghdad Newsroom)
26 JUN 2002 08:28:55 Iraqi paper urges Arabs to ignore Bush policy speech
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