SOMEBODY said: "The crowds for last Saturday's peace march in London - it was just like Diana's funeral." From across the room came the reply: "Yes, except this is going to be our funeral." Why? Well, do please read on...

"Shortly before a carefully orchestrated series of terrorist attacks devastated the eastern seaboard of the United States on the morning of September 11, 2001, Saddam Hussein, the President of Iraq, placed his troops on 'Alert G', the highest state of military readiness Iraqi troops had seen since the 1991 Gulf War. Saddam himself retreated to one of his heavily fortified bunkers in the family fiefdom of Tikrit in northern Iraq." He did those things, of course, because he knew very well what was about to happen in New York and Washington. There is more, a lot more...

"Saddam has been directly involved with such infamous terrorists as Abu Nidal, the leader of the radical Palestinian group that was held responsible for, among other atrocities, the attacks on the Rome and Vienna airports in 1985; and the legendary Venezuelan Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, or Carlos the Jackal as he was known."

Saddam's practise of terrorism is obsessive and continuous. "He established a terrorist training camp south of Baghdad, which has hosted groups of Islamic fighters from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Egypt. The camp contained a Boeing 707 airliner, used to teach recruits how to hijack a plane with only their bare hands or knives - techniques used by the September 11 hijackers."

Again: "In the late 1990s, details emerged of a plan devised by Saddam in which a detachment of his security network, Unit 999, would collaborate with al Qaida to undertake a number of attacks in Europe."

He has a record of using weapons of mass destruction. His uncle, who brought him up, was a Nazi, and Saddam used on the Kurdish people "...a new death agent which bore a striking similarity to the poison gas the Nazis had used to exterminate the Jews more than 40 years before. The first chemical attacks were reported in 1987, when about 20 Kurdish villages were attacked. Five thousand people were killed in one day, and nearly ten thousand were wounded. "

His nuclear programme remains intact: "On 7th June 1981, the Israeli air force bombed his nuclear reactor, just one month before it was due to become operational. The reactor was destroyed, but most of the enriched uranium, which had been stored in a deep underground canal, remained intact. This would enable Saddam to recommence his beloved nuclear weapons programme at a later date." As Mr Blair pointed out last Saturday, Saddam has killed more than a million and he will kill millions more unless we get rid of him.

In the light of the attitude of Germany and France towards the US and British proposal to remove Saddam by force, it might be worth remarking in passing that: "The French were outraged by the Israeli raid on Saddam's nuclear reactor, and immediately promised to rebuild it."

(I have been quoting from "Saddam: The Secret Life" by Con Coughlin, an expert with 20 years experience of research and writing about Middle East affairs.)

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.

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