U.S. Intends to Invade, Iraq Asserts

As the Baghdad regime played host to European and American peace activists, top Iraqi officials complained Thursday that U.N. inspectors have found nothing in their search for weapons of mass destruction but that the United States is still planning to invade.

The weapons inspectors have visited 230 sites since returning to the country in late November but haven’t found “any prohibited activities or prohibited items,” Gen. Hussam Mohammed Amin, the chief Iraqi official dealing with the inspectors, told a news conference. “These five weeks have proven that the Iraqi declaration was real and that American and British allegations are baseless. They are lying for political reasons.”

Earlier in the day, Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz told a group of European antiwar activists, “We know that the inspectors haven’t discovered anything.” But Aziz accused Washington of wanting to invade Iraq as part of a plan to control the region’s oil supplies, regardless of what the U.N. arms inspectors find.

“When they continue their preparations for the war of aggression, what does that mean?” Aziz said. “It doesn’t mean that they are genuinely afraid of an imaginary Iraqi threat. It means that they have an imperialist design. That design is to invade Iraq, to occupy Iraq and use the national resources of Iraq for the purposes of ... the American capitalist regime.”

In a separate news conference Thursday evening, Bob Edgar, general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said that the U.S. group’s 13-member delegation -- which met with Aziz earlier in the week -- believes that “there is a chance to move back from the brink of war.”

“We came to see the faces of the Iraqi people so that American people, who can see the faces of children laughing and singing, could also see the faces of Iraqi children crying, hurting and suffering,” Edgar said.

During its visit, which began Sunday, the delegation visited two hospitals, two schools, three churches and four mosques.

The members “worshiped with Iraqi children, with Iraqi Christians and in the presence of Muslims, and prayed with both,” Edgar said.

“This is the birthplace of Abraham, the father of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” he added. “We acknowledged and celebrated our oneness in God. We came asking the question ‘what’ -- ‘What is going on in Iraq?’ But we were met with ‘why’ questions -- ‘Why us?’ ‘Why now?’ ‘Why war is the answer?’

“The inspectors are here. They are inspecting,” Edgar said. “Let them do their work. While the inspections are going on, we would hope that negotiations would also be going on between the two governments. The U.S. and the Iraqi government have worked together in the past. They can work together in the future.”

The church delegation issued a statement that “a war with Iraq will make the U.S. less secure, not more secure. All wars have unintended consequences. We believe the entire region, including Israel and the United States, will be at greater risk of terrorism if war takes place.”

Edgar described himself as “a wide-eyed optimist” who is “hopeful that the war will not take place.”

“But all the signs that we see in the world today, and the rhetoric of the governments of both the United States and Iraq,” he said, “lean in the direction of war.”

The Iraqi government has been reaching out to some opposition forces, and Aziz made another gesture in that direction Thursday by publicly inviting the Communist Party to return to Iraq and join the struggle.

“This nation is in the vanguard of fighting against U.S. imperialism,” Aziz said. “It is time for the Communists to come back and join our struggle instead of staying abroad and writing articles which attack our government. We can understand that people make mistakes. Even Communists.”

The European activist audience burst into applause and laughter. Aziz, looking pleased, also laughed lightly.

After the meeting with Aziz, about 50 members of the two delegations of European peace campaigners staged a demonstration in downtown Baghdad, unfolding antiwar and anti-embargo posters and an Iraqi flag, and chanting anti-American slogans in front of dozens of TV cameras.