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What
is Bush “thinking about”?
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CRAWFORD,
Texas, August 22 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – While Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday, August 21, that U.S.
President George W. Bush was “thinking about” an attack on Iraq,
Bush reiterated his determination that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
had to be removed from power.
Bush
vowed to consult U.S. allies and lawmakers about military action
against Iraq, striving to calm what he calls a “frenzy” of
speculation that a U.S. attack is imminent, even as Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld admits Bush is “thinking about it.”
“I’m
a patient man, and we will look at all options, and we will consider
all technologies available to us, and diplomacy, and intelligence,”
Bush said Wednesday, August 21, after a half-day meeting with top
national security advisers, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
“The
American people know my position, and that is that regime change is in
the interest of the world. How we achieve that is a matter of
consultation and deliberation,” he added, speaking with Rumsfeld at
his side.
Later,
Rumsfeld, meeting with U.S. troops at nearby Fort Hood, Texas, quipped
that Bush was “thinking about” an attack on Iraq when asked by a
soldier how such a war would impact U.S. relations with Russia.
“The
president has made no such decision that we should go into a war with
Iraq,” he said, adding with a chuckle, “He’s thinking about
it.”
Bush
said Iraq “didn’t come up” during talks here with Vice President
Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, national security
adviser Condoleezza Rice, joint chiefs chairman General Richard Myers,
and the head of the Pentagon’s missile defense office, Lieutenant
General Ronald Kadish.
Bush’s
remarks came after he dismayed opponents of unilateral military action
against Iraq by meeting what will, in effect, become his war cabinet,
made up entirely of pro- invasion hawks, the U.K. daily newspaper, the
Times, reported Thursday, August 22.
Most
significant of all was the absence of Colin Powell, the dovish
Secretary of State, from the private talks at the President’s ranch
in Texas.
Just
hours after the U.S. leader sought to calm what he termed “a
churning, a frenzy” that he will soon carry out his repeated threats
to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld at Ford Hood said
there was nothing definite.
“The
president has made no such decision that we should go into a war with
Iraq,” Rumsfeld said before adding with a chuckle: “He’s
thinking about it.”
Those
comments came a day after General Tommy Franks, the commander of U.S.
forces in the Gulf, said he would present Bush with “credible
options” for military action against Iraq.
Bush
stressed that Franks was absent from the meeting on his “Prairie
Chapel” ranch here, and that the general was following a directive
to plan for “all contingencies,” not charting a course for battle,
AFP reported.
Bush
and Rumsfeld said that the meeting aimed to assess the impact of the
September 11 terrorist attacks and Washington’s new freedom to
deploy a missile defense system on longstanding plans to modernize the
US military.
“The
cold, hard fact is that the United States lives in a very different
security environment today in this 21st century than we did prior to
September 11,” said Rumsfeld, who was here a year ago for a similar
discussion.
Sounding
the same conciliatory tone on missile defense - which like Iraq policy
has worried many U.S. allies, as well as China - Bush emphasized that
Rumsfeld and top aides were briefing friends abroad on U.S. progress.
“That’s
one of the things I said when we withdrew from the ABM Treaty, that we
would consult with our friends and allies, and we are,” he said,
referring to the scrapped Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that forbad
missile defense.
Asked
how swiftly the United States could deploy a missile defense, Rumsfeld
demurred, saying that is “not knowable” until Washington gets
further along in the testing and research and development phase.
“And
as that continues to succeed and to work out, we then will put things
in place and they will evolve over a period of time,” the defense
secretary said, describing a “layered” testing program taking aim
at incoming missiles at various points in their flight.
Rumsfeld
said that much of the discussion had centered on Bush’s longstanding
efforts to transform the U.S. military to counter threats of the 21st
century, namely by making U.S. forces lighter, more nimble, and more
lethal.
The
president and his aides mulled military spending for the 2004-2009
period even though the U.S. Congress has yet to approve the 2003
budget, which includes the largest increase since the end of the Cold
War.
Iraq
looms large in such budgetary issues, because U.S. forces have been
deployed to enforce “no-fly zones” there since the end of the 1991
Gulf War and because any future attack would likely have a major
impact on spending.
“We
have the task, in the Department of Defense, of seeing that we’re
able to provide the kind of defense capabilities and deterrents that
will enable our country to contribute to peace and stability and to
protect the American people,” said Rumsfeld.
Meanwhile,
the U.S. government claimed Wednesday that a number of senior Al-Qaeda
figures have taken refuge inside Iraq and are being sheltered by
Saddam Hussein, the U.K. daily newspaper, the Independent, reported
Thursday, August 22.
The
claim came as Bush met his senior military advisers in Texas and said
the removal of the Iraqi President was “in the interests of the
world,” the paper said.
