Bush warns Iraqi military over weapon

US PRESIDENT George W Bush yesterday warned the Iraqi military they would be prosecuted as war criminals if they used weapons of mass destruction on US troops or their own people.

“There’ll be serious consequences for any general or soldier who were to use weapons of mass destruction on our troops or innocent lives within Iraq,” Bush said.

“Should any Iraqi officer or soldier receive an order from (Iraqi president) Saddam Hussein or his sons or any of the killers who occupy the high levels of their government, my advice is don’t follow that order,” Bush said. “If you choose to do so, when Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried and persecuted as a war criminal.”

Bush has vowed to disarm Iraq forcibly unless it does so voluntarily under UN resolutions. He has said he has not yet decided on military action. US intelligence has picked up “indications about unrest” among Iraqi leaders faced with possible war with US-led forces, the Pentagon’s top general said yesterday, without offering any evidence.

Air Force General Richard Myers also told reporters in an interview that the US military would continue to send forces to the Gulf.

Myers, chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there were hints some of Saddam’s senior supporters might be cracking under the pressure from the US and Britain for Iraq’s president to step down.

“There are some indications about unrest in some of the Iraqi leadership. But just hints. We have not seen anything (about) purges” by Saddam, Myers said in an interview.

Declining to provide details or to say how Washington had obtained such hints of any unrest, the general said the United States had seen only small troop movements in Iraq but nothing unusual “and nothing to show that the military hierarchy isn’t responding to orders.”

British Prime Minister Tony Blair, himself under pressure at home and in the international community to delay any attack on Iraq, said this week that the pressure on Baghdad was already having an effect on Saddam’s government. “They are rattled. They are weakening,” he told the House of Commons.

France and Germany have joined forces to prevent war on Iraq, accused by Washington of hiding banned weapons of mass destruction. French President Jacques Chirac yesterday called war “the worst solution.” Meanwhile, Iraq said its anti-aircraft gunners had shot down a $3.2 million unmanned US Predator, but the US military denied it had lost the spy drone.

“We did not lose a Predator,” said Lt Daniel Hetlage, a Pentagon spokesman. In Baghdad, an Iraqi military spokesman was quoted by the official INA news agency as saying: “Iraqi air force defences downed an American Predator spy plane coming from Kuwait.”

Iraq regularly fires at US and British jets patrolling the “no-fly” zones over north and south Iraq, imposed by the Allies after the 1991 Gulf War. But so far there has been no independent confirmation of a crewed aircraft being shot down.