Knight Ridder Newspapers March 15, 2003
War looms as Bush prepares to meet with allies
By Ken Moritsugu, S. Thorne Harper and Fawn Vrazo
WASHINGTON - President Bush gave every indication Saturday that he intends to remove Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein by force, even as he prepared to meet with two key allies, the prime ministers of Britain and Spain, for another round of diplomacy.
In his weekly radio address, Bush said "there is little reason to hope that Saddam Hussein will disarm" and pledged that a U.S.-led coalition would "confront a growing danger . . . to remove a patron and protector of terror."
War loomed ever closer on both the diplomatic and military fronts, despite hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters who took to the streets in the United States and around the world.
In Kuwait, Army soldiers who would be the first ground troops into Iraq were briefed for the first time on their battle plans.
Members of the 3rd Infantry Division began marking the roofs their vehicles with thermal tape so that American aircraft wouldn't fire on them by mistake.
"This is all part of a process. It doesn't mean that anything is imminent," said Capt. Tom McNew, a spokesman for the division's 3rd Brigade.
With negotiations for a second U.N. resolution on Iraq at an impasse, diplomats were awaiting the outcome of Bush's meeting Sunday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar on the outside chance it might produce a breakthrough.
But, without the participation of the leading opponents to war, France, Germany and Russia, it was unclear what could be achieved in the meeting at a U.S. air base in the Azores islands off Portugal.
France, Russia and Germany issued a joint declaration saying "nothing justifies in the present circumstances putting a stop to the inspection process and resorting to the use of force."
They called for a meeting of foreign ministers at the U.N. Security Council on Tuesday to discuss a timetable for Saddam to disarm.
But Bush, in his Saturday radio address, said "Governments are now showing whether their stated commitments to liberty and security are words alone, or convictions they're prepared to act upon."
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw signaled Saturday that his country is prepared to go to war without a second resolution.
In Iraq, U.S. warplanes continued their stepped-up bombing of Iraqi radar systems, a strategy that military analysts have said could be a prelude to a full-blown war.
Pilots launched two airstrikes in southern Iraq, about 230 miles west of Baghdad, the third time in two days they used precision-guided weapons to target radar sites near the Jordanian border. Commanders fear Iraq could use the stretch of desert to launch missiles at Israel, as happened during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
There have been 125 airstrikes since November, compared with 110 in the previous 34 months, according to GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington non-profit group that focuses on defense issues.
Antiwar protests took place in some two dozen cities in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the United States.
In Washington, tens of thousands of sun-drenched protestors massed at the Washington Monument before walking up to Pennsylvania Avenue, where they encircled the White House in the latest, and possibly the largest, of recent war protests in the nation's capital.
Toting signs with slogans like "Health Care Not Warfare," "Peace is Patriotic" and "War is not the Way," the crowd of students, activists, labor leaders and everyday people chanted anti-war slogans and heard from dozens of speakers calling on the United States to drop plans to invade Iraq.
U.S. Representative John Conyers, D-Michigan, was the only member of Congress to address the overflow crowd. Conyers, who has called for President Bush's impeachment over his handling of the Iraq crisis, drew loud cheers by calling for a "regime change" in the White House as well as Iraq.
Conyers said Saddam should be removed from office and face trial for war crimes, but added, "we don't have to destroy a nation and millions of people in that cause."
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(Knight Ridder correspondents Tony Pugh, Tosin Sulaiman, Peter Smolowitz, Andrea Gerlin, Sudarsan Raghavan and Tim Johnson contributed to this report.)
Copyright © 2003, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
