"When they continue their preparations for the war of aggression, what does that mean? It doesn't mean that they are genuinely afraid of an imaginary Iraqi threat. It means that they have an imperialist design," Aziz told a visiting delegation of European peace activists.

"The design is to invade Iraq, to occupy Iraq, and to use the national resources of Iraq for the purposes of the military industrial complex, and for the purposes of the American capitalist regime," he added.

US defense officials said on Wednesday the US military has kicked off a fresh military buildup in the Gulf by ordering over 11,000 desert-trained troops to begin moving to the region in the coming days.

The movement of the troops, which is from the 3rd US Infantry Division, marked the first deployment of a full combat division by the US military in the region since the end of the 1991 Gulf War.

The deployment is also part of a larger planned military buildup which aims to double the US military presence in the Gulf in early January, with an eventual total strength of up to 110,000 troops.

The United States has accused Iraq of secretly pursuing weapons of mass destruction and threatened to take preemptive action if Baghdad fails to disarm itself.

While denying it has any prohibited doomsday weapons, Iraq has accepted UN Security Council Resolution 1441 that provides for a tougher weapons inspection regime in the country.

"America has been using all pretexts about the so-called weapons of mass destruction to tell the American people and other people, specially in Europe, that Iraq constitutes a threat. But Iraq has never constituted a threat to Europe or to the United States in all its history," Aziz said.

Aziz said Iraq has allowed the UN arms inspectors to "visit whatever sites they want to visit" and they have so far found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

But the United States "didn't say 'let us wait for a while for the result of the inspection and then let's decide what to do'," Aziz told the European peace activists.

Under resolution 1441, the weapons experts resumed their hunting for prohibited weapons of mass destruction in Iraq on Nov. 27 aftera four-year suspension.

There are currently 110 inspectors in Iraq, 100 of whom are from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and ten from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

They must give their first report to the UN Security Council about Iraq's weapons programs by a Jan. 27 deadline.

(Xinhua News Agency January 3, 2002)