Iraqi President Saddam Hussein declared Monday that Iraq would no sooner leave Kuwait than the United States would evacuate Hawaii.

Addressing a U.S. television audience, Hussein claimed that “truth, dignity, honor and God” are on his side, but he also held out a glimmer of hope that a diplomatic solution is still possible.

Speaking in an hourlong interview taped in Baghdad for Cable News Network, the Iraqi strongman said that the weekend diplomatic mission of Soviet envoy Yevgeny Primakov yielded a dialogue “which is wide-ranging, deep and very useful.”

But he left little doubt that any negotiated settlement would be on his own terms--terms that the United States and its allies have relentlessly rejected.


In addition to holding fast to his claims on Kuwait, Hussein called again for a comprehensive international conference on Middle East “problems” that would link the Iraqi seizure of Kuwait with Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights, territories once held by Jordan, Egypt and Syria, respectively.

Wearing a Western business suit similar to the one he wore weeks ago when he patted the heads of Western children held hostage by his regime, Hussein seemed fully prepared for any question and successfully turned most of them to his advantage.

Speaking softly and calmly, at times smiling and leaning a cheek on two fingers as if toying with his questioners, he said he is not an aggressor but the victim of Western, U.S.-led aggression.

He referred to the United States as “an occupying army” in Saudi Arabia.


The infidel, he said “has occupied the Kaaba"--the shrine that houses the sacred stone in the Grand Mosque of Mecca in Saudi Arabia. The confrontation is the doing of “Israel and the Zionist influence.” He claimed that he and his forces are battling for “the Arab nation” as a whole.

“I believe in fighting for justice and truth and rejecting injustice and fearing only the one true God,” he said.

“If God wills war,” he added in another of many invocations of the supreme being, “we will accept it.” At another point, he said: “If truth is on our side and if we are on the side of righteousness, we are strong. Because God is on our side with us, everything is in our favor.”

A questioner observed that it was the Iraqi army, not God, that invaded Kuwait. Hussein replied: “America is invading the house of God, to the Kaaba, to the grave of the Prophet Mohammed, while Israel is invading the other house of God” in Jerusalem.


Asked whether Iraq would withdraw from Kuwait if economic sanctions against his country cause economic disaster, Hussein--whose regime has declared Kuwait a province of Iraq--responded with a rhetorical question: Would sanctions force the American people to withdraw from an American state?

Would there be war? he was asked. “Nothing is worse than war, except to be deprived of liberty, dignity, honor and security,” he declared.

Asked about the accumulated record of police terror at home and the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the end of Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran, Hussein explained at length that the civilian deaths were regrettable but were necessary because of an act of “treachery” that let Iranian forces occupy “a border town.”

“Bombs have no eyes with which to see,” Hussein noted, omitting any reference to Iraqi poison gas but explicitly recalling the U.S. nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.


Asked about the array of U.N. resolutions against Iraq and the unanimity of international opinion assembled by the United States and the West, Hussein was well prepared to turn the question to his advantage.

There have been, he said, “dozens of U.N. resolutions on occupied Palestine and the territories occupied by Israel.” Arabs suffer from a double standard, he declared. Besides, he added, the United States has pressured the Security Council to line up against Iraq.

Yet at another point, Hussein implied that it is the United States that is manipulated by other powers: “There are those who are working for military confrontation. They are, in this order: Israel and the Zionist influence, (British Prime Minister Margaret) Thatcher and (President) Bush.”