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28 October 2002
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http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story... |
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LONDON - A U.S.-led war on Iraq would heighten the risk of regional conflict and increase support for Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network, researchers warned Monday. The independent Oxford Research Group said conventional war would kill 10,000 civilians in Iraq, and could trigger a desperate and destructive response from Saddam Hussein's regime. The Baghdad regime was bent on survival at any cost and would retaliate using "all available military means," including chemical and biological weapons, which could in turn trigger a nuclear response from the United States and Britain, the group warned in a new report. In another development, Prime Minister Tony Blair's office joined the United States on Monday in criticizing the U.N. Security Council for failing to approve a resolution that would threaten Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein with retaliation if he fails to give U.N. inspectors full access to his country when they return there to search for weapons of mass destruction. France, China and Russia have resisted this demand by the United States and Britain. All five countries have the power to veto such a resolution on the U.N. Security Council. "This has been under discussion now since the middle of September, and given that time scale it is coming to the stage where we are going to have to decide whether this is going to be resolved in the U.N. or not," Blair's spokesman said, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity. "We hope we will do so possibly this week, to try and bring this to a head, because we firmly believe the U.N. is the best way of dealing with this issue. But, as the prime minister has said, that genuinely has to be a way of resolving the issue, not avoiding it." Regarding the researchers' report, Paul Rogers, its author and a professor of peace studies at Bradford University, said: "The United States has sufficient forces to ensure regime destruction, but the regime's replacement by occupying forces or by a client regime, even if the war is not greatly destructive, should be expected to increase regional opposition to the U.S. presence." He also said, "It is likely, in particular, to increase support for organizations such as al-Qaida and to prove counterproductive to peace and stability in the region." On the Net:
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