Saddam 'faces US attacks'

The BBC's Tim Sebastian met Richard Holbrooke

Richard Holbrooke, a former US assistant secretary of state, has said that President George W Bush will "take on" Iraqi President Saddam Hussein as part of the continuing war against terrorism.

I don't think it will be Afghanistan Two or Desert Storm Three

Richard Holbrooke

Speaking in an interview with Tim Sebastian for the BBC's Hardtalk television programme, Mr Holbrooke described the American failure to "finish off" Saddam Hussein following the Gulf War in 1991 as "the single biggest mistake made in American foreign policy in the last 20 years".

"Clinton contained Saddam within his box for eight years, but within his box Saddam is probably trying to build weapons of mass destruction," he said.

"I do not believe that this administration will go its full course without trying to change the regime. They will take Saddam on."

Mr Holbrooke went on to say that enlisting the help of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, would be vital in defeating any potential terrorist threat from Iraq.

"I think there are two indispensable allies for any effort against Saddam whatever the method and whatever the time. One is Tony Blair and the other is the Turks," he said.

However, he added that this action would not take the form of large scale air strikes in the region.

"I don't think it will be Afghanistan Two or Desert Storm Three."

War crimes

As the former US representative in the Balkans, Mr Holbrooke was responsible for negotiating with the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic to ensure he signed the Dayton Accord, the agreement which ended the war in Bosnia in 1995.

Mr Milosevic is currently on trial at The Hague, accused of genocide and war crimes in the Balkans.

In the Hardtalk interview, Mr Holbrooke said he believed the international war crimes tribunal had sufficient information to convict Mr Milosevic.

Milosevic is currently on trial at the Hague

He said his relationship with Mr Milosevic had been "professional", and defended himself against criticism that it had been inappropriate to negotiate with a man accused of war crimes.

Mr Holbrooke said: "I knew what he'd done. He'd killed 300,000 people, 2.5 million people were homeless."

But he added that more deaths could have occurred in Bosnia if negotiations had not taken place.

"Tens of thousands more people would have died if we had not bombed Milosevic and then negotiated while bombing," he said.

He went on to condemn Mr Milosevic as "the worst leader on the European continent since the fall of communism and probably since Stalin's death".

Mr Holbrooke also called into question the effectiveness of the Dayton Accord in bringing about peace in the Balkans, claiming it was not "perfect".

"The failure in Bosnia was not the Dayton agreement, it's that we haven't implemented it aggressively enough," he said.

You can see the Hardtalk interview in full at the following times:

BBC News 24 (times shown in GMT)
12 February 0430, repeated 2230

BBC World (times shown in GMT)
12 February 0430, repeated 1130, 1630, 1930, 0030