Iraq's ruling Ba’ath party on Saturday called on Arabs to target the interests of the United States throughout the region.
In a statement published to mark the pan-Arab Ba’ath party's 55th anniversary, the party high command urged "all Arab fighters to strike US interests in the Arab world."
The statement, carried by the official INA agency, also called for targeting "the interests of the Zionist entity which have infiltrated various parts of the Arab world."
The statement lambasted a recently-adopted Saudi proposal which offers Israel a normalization of relations with Arab countries in exchange for a withdrawal from all Arab land occupied in the 1967 war.
The statement slammed as too weak the Arab world's reactions to Israel's nine-day military sweep in the West Bank.
The Iraqi army is continuing its preparations to "liberate Palestine", Iraq's Defense Minister General Sultan Hasim Ahmad said Saturday.
"The armed forces will be the cutting swords in the liberation of our territories in Palestine, including Jerusalem, usurped by the Zionists," the general said in a telegram to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein on the occasion of the 55th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Ba’ath party.
The army "is continuing its training and its mission is facing up to the forces of evil and oppression, represented by criminal America and its odious Zionist ally."
Iraq has rallied to defend the Palestinian cause, announcing in the early days of the 20-month-old Palestinian uprising the mobilization of 6.5 million volunteers for the "liberation of Palestine."
In a separate development, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz told a five-day forum of Iraqi émigrés in Baghdad of the need to step up pro-Palestinian campaigns to counter the Zionist lobby.
Aziz called on the 1,000 participants in the seventh such conference to "face up to the lying and tendentious campaign launched by the Zionist lobby against the just causes of Iraq and Palestine.
"You must step up campaigns and increase pro-Palestinian activities to counter pressure from the Zionist lobby."
The émigrés conference was launched after the 1991 Gulf War to examine means in which Iraqis living overseas - estimated at about three million - could help lift the embargo slapped on Iraq for invading Kuwait in 1990.
Meanwhile, Iraqi newspapers last week quoted Saddam Hussein as saying that Iraq is capable of standing up to an eventual US strike. "Every day, they (Americans) come up with new pretexts to attack Iraq, but their weapons will backfire," Saddam told military officials.
However, General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, stressed that the situation since the 1991 Gulf War with Iraq "has changed dramatically," noting that US capabilities have grown while Baghdad's have diminished. "The Iraqi armed forces is about 40 percent, in terms of numbers, of what it was in the Gulf War," Myers said in an interview with CNN on Saturday.
By contrast, he said, US forces "have more precision weapons and so forth. "For instance, we used 10 percent precision weapons in the Gulf War; we used slightly over 60 percent in Afghanistan." "Our capabilities have grown," Myers said, adding that "Iraqi capabilities have diminished over the same period of time" - in part because of international sanctions imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990. (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
