Bush moves towards showdown with Iraq
The Bush administration today moved steadily toward a military showdown with Iraq and suggested a decision could come as early as next week after UN inspectors credited Iraq with only limited cooperation in the search for weapons.
The United States now intends to provide the inspectors with additional evidence to support its claim that President Saddam Hussein has been moving and hiding thousands of chemical and biological weapons in palaces, mosques and private homes.
A senior Bush adviser said Secretary of State Colin Powell will next week unveil “broad evidence” against Saddam, including new information about his ties to al Qaida, his weapons of mass destruction programme and his efforts to deceive the world community by hiding his deadly arsenal beneath the ground and in mobile facilities.
Some officials are expecting President George Bush to have Powell deliver the material at the United Nations, but details were still being worked out today.
The decision comes as US allies intensified demands for proof that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Bush and his senior advisers refused to tip their hand on when the United States might go to war to force Iraq to disarm. But Powell set out a scenario to bring the tug-of-war with Saddam to a conclusion.
“What we can’t do is just keep kicking the can down the road in the absence of a change in policy and attitude” in Baghdad, Powell said at a State Department news conference, even though he agreed to additional UN inspections.
“We will have our discussions and consultations this week, and then we will announce next steps at an appropriate time,” he said.
The Pentagon pushed ahead with war preparations that would position more than 150,000 troops and four aircraft carrier battle groups, each with more than 70 warplanes, in the Persian Gulf region by the end of February.
In a significant step, the Pentagon concluded an arrangement with the Turkish government to permit up to 20,000 US troops to use bases in Turkey for a potential ground invasion into northern Iraq, a senior Defence Department official said. Turkey, a valued ally in the 1991 war with Iraq to liberate Kuwait, had taken an ambivalent stance this time.
To help the flow of war material to the Gulf, 13 more cargo ships from the US Transportation Department’s Ready Reserve Force fleet have been activated, the department announced. They join 19 other ships already activated.
The Ready Reserve Force ships are operated by American merchant mariners who volunteer for the missions. The fleet augments cargo ships of the Navy’s Military Sealift Command.
The administration’s strategy calls for agreement to possibly a few more weeks of inspections as Powell, US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte and other American diplomats lobby the 14 other members of the Security Council to implement the “serious consequences” with which the Council threatened Iraq in November.
Germany is dead-set against going to war. France, Russia and others are sceptical that a case for war has been made.
Bush, meanwhile, will try to prepare the US for war in his State of the Union address tonight (2am Wednesday Irish time), but will withhold announcement of any decision on an attack that many members of Congress oppose and polls show does not have the support of a majority of the American people.
On Capitol Hill, Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said: “If we have proof of nuclear and biological weapons, why don’t we show that proof to the world?”
Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, urged, “Let’s exhaust every diplomatic remedy before we send our troops.”
To bolster its case, the United States intends to provide the inspectors with additional evidence to support its claim that Saddam has hidden thousands of chemical and biological weapons in palaces, mosques and private homes.
One Iraqi scientist, for instance, has kept from the inspectors a 3,000-word document on Iraqi weapons procurement, a senior US official said.
With anxious US allies also intensifying their demands for proof that Saddam possesses weapons of mass destruction, Powell acknowledged “there are disagreements”.
“There are some who are satisfied with passive cooperation at this point,” he said.
But the UN resolution unanimously approved last November was not about “passive cooperation”, and chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix had “made it rather clear that he is not getting the kind of cooperation, and Iraq has not made the fundamental choice it has to make that it is going to be disarmed,” Powell said.
