The United States will not be able to remove Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power,just it had tried, but failed, in the past to topple the Iraqi strongman, Iraqi Minister of Culture Hamed Yussef Humadi said on Saturday.
"They (the US) have been trying this for the past 20 years and they admitted for many times that they did not succeed. They are not going to succeed because Saddam has the whole (Iraqi) population behind him," Humadi told Xinhua after attending the opening ceremony of a Chinese photo exhibition in the capital Baghdad.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell has said recently that toppling the Saddam regime remained as an aim of the US foreign policy.
When asked about the possibility of the US attacks on Iraq, Humadi said that the US has been attacking Iraq over the past years, referring to US air strikes on targets in two no-fly zones in Iraq set up by the US-led Western allies after the 1991 Gulf War.
The US and Britain have been enforcing the two air exclusive zones since the Gulf War with the claimed aim of protecting the Kurds in the north and Shiite Muslims in the south from the persecution from the Iraqi government.
Humadi also reiterated Iraq's rejection of the return of UN arms inspectors. "We reject spies and intelligence people to come (to Iraq) as arms inspectors, and they are not allowed back."
He claimed that such accusations that the arms inspectors served as "spies" and "intelligence people" were not made by Iraq, but by Richard Butler, former head of the now-defunct UN Special Commission in charge of Iraq's disarmament.
"Butler has acknowledged ... he worked for the (US) Central Intelligence Agency," Humadi said.
Iraq has repeatedly rejected the return of the arms inspectors, who withdrew from Iraq ahead of four-day US-British military strikes against Baghdad in December 1998.
(China Daily December 10, 2001)
