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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lurqer who wrote (37018)	2/5/2004 11:31:08 AM
From: lurqer	Respond to of 89467

The Rove timetable keeps being altered. The 9-11 investigation was extended two months. Now U.S. deadline in Iraq may have to bend, U.N. chief says The Bush administration is sticking to its timetable for Iraqi self-rule by July 1, but U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said yesterday that the deadline might have to be reconsidered to forge an agreement on a provisional government. Asserting that "the U.N. has a role to play in Iraq," Annan said he would send a mission as soon as its safety could be assured but was not ready to reestablish a U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. Two suicide bombings prompted Annan to withdraw U.N. diplomats in October. "We are not going to go back permanently now," he said in New York. Yesterday, an Iraqi insurgent group claimed responsibility for bombings Sunday that killed 109 people at the offices of two Kurdish political parties in the city of Irbil. The Jaish Ansar al-Sunna said it had targeted the "dens of the devils" because of the parties' ties to the United States. The claim could not be independently confirmed. The administration is looking to the United Nations to talk to a wide range of Iraqi leaders about the planned transition from U.S. occupation to Iraqi sovereignty. The United States does not want to postpone the July 1 deadline or hold the direct elections of an interim assembly demanded by Shiite clerics. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the administration and some U.N. experts remained convinced that elections could not be held before July 1, when the U.S. occupation is due to end. "But we are willing to listen to ideas when the U.N. team comes back to see what they might say," Boucher said. The administration kept the United Nations at arm's length before and during the U.S.-led war last year that ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. But to give its postwar planning what one U.S. official called "more credibility," the United States invited Annan to assist in planning transition and a constitutional democracy in Iraq. That, in turn, has produced some different shadings in view. Annan, who conferred Tuesday with President Bush and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in Washington, said in New York that both U.S. administrators and the Iraqi Governing Council considered July 1 a firm deadline when they drafted transition plans in November. "So we are working on the agreement between them," Annan said. "If they were to change that understanding, that agreement, of course it would be something that we would have to consider." Annan said both U.S. administrators and Iraqis on the council told him Jan. 19 that the July 1 date was firm "but that beyond that we could really come up with options that they can look at, and that can help them establish a provisional government." Boucher was holding fast to the deadline. "Our actions, our planning is all designed to make this transfer of power work on June 30, as planned," he said. "So as the U.N. looks at this situation, they understand that that's a goal that we all want to achieve." He said Annan had said during Tuesday's talks in Washington that "he might have some ideas on the June 30 date, so we will have to see what they are." Whatever the outcome, Bush said the people of Iraq were moving toward self-government. "Saddam Hussein now sits in a prison cell, and Iraqi men and women are no longer carried to torture chambers and rape rooms and dumped in mass graves," he said in a speech at the Library of Congress yesterday. Bush also said a new television network financed by the U.S. government would soon broadcast in Arabic and Persian to "cut through the hateful propaganda that fills the airwaves in the Muslim world." Also yesterday, a senior U.S. commander said recent attacks in Iraq were the work of groups seeking to sabotage - or gain leverage in - a future independent Iraqi government. Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the Army's Fourth Infantry Division, also predicted that coalition forces would be able to crush the insurgency within a year. "There are ethnic issues," Odierno said after a tour of Tikrit, Hussein's hometown. "People are now positioning themselves to see what their role is in the next government, and they are doing it by force. They are trying to disrupt the way things are going so they can get a little advantage." philly.com lurqer