US wants Saddam for losing bin Laden says Russia

iafrica.com

Russia accused the United States on Thursday of zeroing in on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in frustration at failing to track down al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov also dismissed speculation that Moscow was trying to convince Saddam to step down or that the United Nations had the authority to orchestrate a US-led "regime change" in Baghdad.

"Moscow does not agree that the futile search for bin Laden should be compensated for by calling Iraq as the earth's main centre of evil," Ivanov told the Trud daily in an unusually harsh condemnation of US military plans in Iraq. He again stressed that the Baghdad leadership had so far not breached UN Security Council resolution 1441 which sets strict terms on Iraq's cooperation with weapons inspectors.

And he dismissed the notion that either Russia or the United Nations had the authority to negotiate Saddam's abdication as a means of avoiding a war.

"We have never done so," Ivanov said when asked whether Moscow could be trying to convince Saddam to go into exile.

"Any talk of discussions about Saddam Hussein's resignation which Russian diplomats are allegedly holding in Baghdad are nothing more than fabrications," Ivanov said.

Such a step "would have been tantamount to interfering in Iraq's internal affairs," he added. Ivanov conceded that Moscow was in part viewing the Iraqi confrontation from the perspective of what a military strike might do to the Russian economy.

Moscow is keen not to lose its massive investments in Iraq's vast oil fields and is further concerned that Western states who might grab up these contracts would flood the world market with cheap oil and thus strip Russia — a major energy exporter — of one of its main sources of budget revenues.

"World oil prices are important to us. We have economic interests in Iraq. But it cannot be said that these are the only factors that determine our position there."