Iraq played no role in the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States and has no connection with the rash of anthrax incidents, according to the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Tariq Aziz. However, he stressed that Iraq has no intention of helping Washington discover who was responsible.
Mr Aziz said that after more than a decade of being at odds with the United States, he is not surprised by a rush to judgment against Iraq. But he said that to accuse his country is to misunderstand its ideological foundation, which rejects Islamic fundamentalism as practised by Osama bin Laden. It also fails to take cognisance of the practical strides Iraq has made in recent years.
"Whatever happens in the United States, someone would raise his finger and point to Iraq," Mr Aziz said during his first lengthy interview with the Western media since the attacks. "We don't like this kind of agitation against Iraq. These are cheap, baseless, ridiculous accusations. How can we do these things? Why?"
In the days immediately after the attacks, some analysts and policy-makers speculated that the operation was so massive in scope and so expertly orchestrated that a terror network such as bin Laden's al-Qaeda would need the assistance of a state to have pulled it off. Some influential voices in Washington and in London have argued that Iraq must have been that state.
No proof linking Iraq to the attacks has been presented by the United States or Britain. But there has been a lot of speculation, fuelled by reports from the Czech Republic that an Iraqi diplomat had several times met the suspected hijacker Mohammed Attah before the diplomat was expelled from Prague.
Mr Aziz, a long-time associate of President Saddam and a man who became familiar to television viewers during the 1991 Gulf War, avoided the kind of hyperbole common in Baghdad - both in condemning the United States' "aggression" against Iraq and in defending Iraq's actions over the past decade.
On the issue of Mr Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Ani, the Iraqi diplomat expelled from Prague, Mr Aziz said the allegation was a fabrication. "This meeting did not take place," Mr Aziz said. "It is a lie. We checked with him: 'Did you ever meet somebody called Attah?' "
When asked if the question was posed more broadly to Mr Ani, to cover the possibility that Attah met him using a different name, Mr Aziz said: "Even if such an incident had taken place, it doesn't mean anything. Any diplomat in any mission might meet people in a restaurant here or there and talk to them, which is meaningless. If that person turned out to be something else, that doesn't mean he had a connection with what that person did later."
From his perspective, the troubles between the United States and Iraq began not with Iraqi troops entering Kuwait in August 1990 but with Washington's refusal to negotiate a political solution to their differences .
"America chose to be the enemy of Iraq," Mr Aziz said, adding that he tried to bridge the political divide with former Presidents Bush and Clinton and was rebuffed without even an answer. "For eight years, the American government refused a meeting even of junior diplomats."
Then, he said, not long after the September 11th attacks, the US broke that silence with a letter to Iraq delivered via its ambassador to the United Nations. The letter warned Baghdad not to take advantage of the current crisis. Iraq responded by calling the note "stupid".