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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (522040)	1/10/2004 3:24:43 PM
From: Hope Praytochange	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

In the General's Black Hawk, Flying Over a Divided Iraq By JOHN F. BURNS BU SAIDA, Iraq, Jan. 9 — Aboard a Black Hawk helicopter skimming nose down at 50 feet across a landscape of palm groves and semidesert north of Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez gazed out at lone shepherds and donkey carts and villagers staring back passively at the airborne flotilla hastening northward across Iraq's horizons. Then the headset crackled, and General Sanchez, 52, from Rio Grande City, Tex., who commands the 38-nation coalition of allied forces in Iraq, summarized his thoughts in a way that encapsulated America's challenge here nine months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "They don't want us here, but they don't want us to leave, either," he said. "That's our dilemma; that's the problem we have to solve." General Sanchez began life at the bottom of the pyramid, going to work as a dry-cleaner's delivery boy at the age of 6 to augment welfare payments that supported his Mexican-American family in Rio Grande City, a few miles from the border that his paternal grandfather first crossed in the early 1900's. Now, addressing "the problem we have to solve," he is into his eighth month as commander of 125,000 American troops in Iraq, the most coveted and challenging field command for any American officer since the Vietnam War. / A month ago, General Sanchez's troops captured Mr. Hussein, the most auspicious moment in the occupation since the Iraqi dictator's statue was toppled in Baghdad on April 9. General Sanchez was in an Army medical clinic about three hours later when Mr. Hussein was brought in by helicopter, manacled and hooded, from his underground spider hole near Tikrit. That, General Sanchez said, with the quietness that is one of his trademarks, brought "a certain sense of accomplishment."