The former US president, Mr George Bush, yesterday revealed that the decision not to attack Baghdad at the end of the Gulf War was necessary to avoid the collapse of the international coalition against President Saddam Hussein of Iraq.
"The coalition would have shattered. I know the French would have left us in a minute," Mr Bush said in London in an interview with the BBC to be broadcast on Sunday.
"I know the Egyptians and the Turks would have been gone. Syria would have been long gone (had) we rolled into Baghdad," he said.
Mr Bush also indicated that snatching Mr Saddam would have been almost impossible, even given the vast resources of the US intelligence services.
"Who's going to find the most secure, potentate dictator in the world?" Mr Bush asked.
He added that the US had never wanted to "be an occupying power in an Arab land, doing exactly what Saddam had told his legions we wanted to be."
Reuters adds from Bonn: A disgraced German diplomat convicted of spying for Iraq was yesterday quoted as saying he had no regrets about passing Western military and political intelligence to Mr Saddam on the eve of the Gulf War.
Mr Juergen Mohammed Gietler (42), a former archivist for the foreign ministry, told Der Spiegel magazine that for many years in the 1980s he had also passed secret German documents about Israel and the Middle East to Egypt.
In the first public revelation about his conviction, Der Spiegel said Mr Gietler was found guilty in a 1991 trial of giving Iraqi agents in Bonn secret information that helped Baghdad during and after the Gulf War crisis of 1990-1991.
Among the most potentially damaging documents he passed along were secret letters between President Bush and the German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, about US military plans to move troops and weapons through Germany to drive Iraq out of Kuwait.
"It is indeed reprehensible, but I just cannot regret what I did," said Mr Gietler, who was released in 1994 after three years in jail and now works as a businessman in Ghana.
Mr Gietler, who converted to Islam while on a posting to Cairo in 1982, also passed Iraqi agents photocopied reports of what Western intelligence agencies knew about foreign companies helping Iraq build weapons of mass destruction.