The Seattle Times
Nation & World: Wednesday, January 22, 2003
Allies' caution over Iraq leaves Bush steaming
By Seattle Times News Services
WASHINGTON — Increasingly impatient with resistance from key allies, President Bush yesterday called their challenges to U.S. policy on Iraq a "rerun of a bad movie" and pledged to take on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein militarily if he does not fully disarm.
Bush disagreed with U.N. Security Council members who have said weapons inspectors should be given more time in Iraq, recalling that all of them, "including the French," voted in November to impose "serious consequences" if Iraq did not disclose and dismantle all of its weapons of mass destruction programs.
"This business about, you know, more time — you know, how much time do we need to see clearly that he's not disarming?" Bush said of Saddam. "This looks like a rerun of a bad movie, and I'm not interested in watching it."
"He is delaying. He is deceiving. He is asking for time. He's playing hide and seek with inspectors. One thing for sure is, he's not disarming," Bush said after talks with economists on his proposed tax-cutting package.
France, Germany, China and other leading powers on the U.N. Security Council maintain that U.N. arms inspections should continue at least two more months before making a judgment on war.
Leading the charge to give inspectors more time, French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on Monday accused the U.S. of overeagerness and impatience, and said that "we believe that nothing today justifies envisaging military action."
Bush's testy remarks came as the administration escalated its campaign to persuade the world's governments and public that military action against Iraq is justifiable and necessary.
The effort began yesterday with a speech by Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who said that Saddam's "regime has very little time left. ... There is no sign, there is not one sign that the regime has any intent to comply" with United Nations demands.
Tomorrow, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz will deliver the same message in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
Bush's State of the Union speech on Tuesday will include a heavy emphasis on Iraq.
Senior aides are eager that Bush not appear to pre-empt a separate calendar of events at the Security Council, where Hans Blix, the head of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director general Mohamed ElBaradei are due Monday to make their first comprehensive report on Iraqi compliance with inspections that began two months ago.
On Jan. 29, the day after Bush's speech, the council will convene to debate the report and decide what further steps to take, although it remains unclear if anyone will push for a war resolution then.
The Bush administration has maintained that a new resolution isn't necessary, arguing that last fall's U.N. resolution and others already authorize it to act. Bush has said he is ready to act unilaterally but prefers to go through the United Nations.
Bush yesterday also predicted that the United States will eventually garner wider support, despite growing antiwar protests and public opinion polls at home and overseas showing a majority opposed to military action without U.N. backing.
"It is very much like what happened prior to our getting a resolution out of the United Nations. Many of the punditry were quick to say, 'No one is going to follow the United States.' And we got a unanimous resolution out of the United Nations," he said.
Members of Congress — which has voted to support for a military invasion of Iraq, if necessary — are also increasingly leery. Yesterday, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Houston, who opposes a war, offered a resolution to rescind congressional support.
"I want the president to listen and the Congress to listen — the U.S. House, the people's house — to listen to the rising voice calling for diplomacy over war, peace over violence," she said.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., also delivered a stern, pre-emptive rebuke of the Republican president.
"Surely, we can have effective relationships with other countries, without adopting a chip-on-the-shoulder foreign policy, a my-way-or-the-highway policy that makes all our goals in the world more difficult to achieve," Kennedy told the National Press Club. "This is the wrong war at the wrong time."
But neither Bush nor other officials indicated there was much likelihood the anticipated war would be postponed for long.
"I wish I were here to tell you that I am optimistic," Armitage told a packed hall at the Institute of Peace in Washington.
Listing the thousands of weapons of mass destruction Iraq was known to possess when the last round of U.N. inspections ended in 1998, Armitage said it was not the job of the new inspectors to find them, but Iraq's responsibility to turn them over.
As Armitage spoke, aides in the back of the room passed out copies of a 25-page booklet entitled "Apparatus of Lies," a compilation of what it called "the lies that Iraq has used to promote its propaganda and disinformation," most dating from 1990 and 1991.
In one gruesome example, the document cites British media reports on how the regime stored the bodies of dead children until enough were accumulated to hold stage-managed funerals, where the deaths were blamed on the sanctions. Those funerals got wide international media coverage.
The document was the first major product of the White House Office of Global Communications, which Bush officially signed into existence with an executive order yesterday.
Headed by veteran Bush administration and campaign media operative Tucker Eskew, the office will oversee and coordinate a daily foreign policy message for the government.
Compiled from The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Knight Ridder Newspapers and The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company |
