BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) — After a warning from Washington, the United Nations ordered its weapons inspectors to leave Iraq. Diplomats and foreign journalists also fled in the clearest sign yet that the United States would soon attack.

In a televised address to the United States last night, US President George W Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq and go into exile or face war.

Saying American forces will wage war “at a time of our choosing”, Bush said Saddam has weapons of mass destruction he might share with terrorists, has a history of hating America and is a destabilising force in the Middle East.

“The United States did nothing to deserve or invite this threat, but we will do everything to defeat it. Instead of drifting along toward tragedy, we will set a course toward safety,” the president said from the White House.

“The tyrant will soon be gone,” he said.

Defiant to the end, Saddam Hussein gave no sign of heeding US demands that he step down and warned that American forces would find an Iraqi fighter ready to die for his country “behind every rock, tree and wall”.

But Saddam made a last-minute bid to avert war, admitting publicly that Iraq had once possessed weapons of mass destruction to defend itself from Iran and Israel — but that it no longer had them.

“We are not weapons collectors,” the official Iraqi News Agency quoted him as telling Tunisian foreign minister, Habib Ben Yahia. “But we had these weapons for purposes of self-defence when we were at war with Iran for eight years and when the Zionist entity (Israel) was, and it still is, a threat.”

“When Saddam Hussein says he has no weapons of mass destruction, he means what he says,” the Iraqi leader said.

Baghdad residents prepared for the worst, flooding markets to stock up on food, lining up for gas and bread and taping their windows for fear of flying glass from US bombs.

Iraqi information minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, said Saddam wouldn’t leave. “He will stay in place like a solid rock,” he told Qatar-based television Al-Jazeera in an interview yesterday.

Saddam issued a warning of his own to Washington, saying: “Not even 10 Americas will be able to separate the people of Iraq away from their land, rights, freedom, independence and sovereignty.”

“If it attacks Iraq, it will find Iraqi fighters ready to fight and ready for martyrdom in defence of their country behind every rock, tree and wall,” he said.

The threat of war mounted after the United States, Britain and Spain announced they wouldn’t put their resolution seeking authorisation to use military force against Iraq to a vote because of a threatened French veto.

Shortly afterward, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced that after receiving a warning from Washington, he was ordering all UN staff out of Iraq — 156 inspectors and support staff, humanitarian workers and UN observers monitoring the Iraqi-Kuwait border.

UN spokesman Hiro Ueki said inspectors were expected to begin leaving today.

Al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi information minister, said the United States and Britain were looking for a pretext to attack, accusing them of hunting “for a white crow”, an Arabic idiomatic expression for something that does not exist.

Other foreigners, including diplomats from Germany, the Czech Republic, India, China, Bahrain and Britain, were already leaving Iraq as well as neighbouring Kuwait amid fears that Baghdad could retaliate against any US-led war.