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Bush
changed tactics, but not goals to attack Iraq
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Additional
Reporting by Khaled Mamdouh, IOL Staff
CAIRO,
Sept 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – U.S. President George W.
Bush is to meet with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at Camp David
Saturday, September 07, 2002, with only one topic on their agenda,
Iraq. The two leaders are expected to adopt a plan of action based on
getting a UN mandate to attack Iraq unless it readmits weapons
inspectors back into the country.
Bush
and Blair Friday, September 6, already started the first step. Both
launched a diplomatic drive to win global backing for tougher action
against Iraq hours after their warplanes staged a major raid on Iraq's military.
They
separately telephoned Russian President Vladimir Putin and French
President Jacques Chirac, both of whom expressed serious reservations
about toppling the Iraqi leader.
The
U.S. President also spoke to Chinese President Jiang Zemin.
Bush,
Putin, Chirac, Jiang and Blair represent the five permanent members of
the UN Security Council and all hold veto power over any UN resolution
on Iraq.
"The
(U.S.) President told the foreign leaders that he values their
opinions. He stressed that Saddam Hussein is a threat and that we need
to work together to make the world more peaceful," White House
spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
Predicting
that a war could break out any time from November, before
Congressional polls in the United States, analysts believe that the
two leaders will have to get “the UN resolution they want very
soon”.
However,
British officials admitted that Blair would be involved in a complex
juggling act in the coming weeks, according to British daily
Telegraph.
Even
if he manages to persuade Bush to deal with Iraq through the UN, he
will struggle to convince Security Council members to set such a
"high bar" for Iraqi compliance.
Given
that Iraq is likely to reject U.S. conditions (to readmit weapons
inspectors back in), America and Britain would effectively be asking
the UN to create a legal pretext for the invasion of Iraq. At the
very least, an invasion force would be set on a hair trigger, and
could be sent into action at the smallest Iraqi violation, the
Telegraph said.
According
to the British daily, Blair believed that only UN backing for
"coercive inspections" would convince Washington hawks to
build an international coalition rather than go it alone against Iraq.
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is carrying plans to help Bush gain some support for military
action
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Another
possible scenario put forward by Blair, according to press reports,
will be for the UN Security Council to deliver a four-week ultimatum
for Iraq to admit weapons inspectors. This way, Bush will still have
time to attack before November.
For
his part, Bush, in light of almost unanimous world rejection of
unilateral military action against a UN member state, seemed more than
willing to listen to Blair and even change tactics in a bid to achieve
his goals and get rid of Saddam. Hence, the flurry of diplomatic
offensive, in a parallel line with military preparations on the
ground.
This
can easily be seen through the change of tone and words. Not long ago,
Bush and other U.S. officials made it clear that “they would attack
Iraq to remove Saddam, whether on not weapons inspectors were allowed
back into Baghdad”.
Also,
when the idea of proposing “a deadline for Iraq to readmit
inspectors back in, or face the consequences” was first declared by
Britain, it was met coolly by Bush and his hawks, who repeated the
same response; “Inspections or not, we will attack”.
On
the ground, meanwhile, the U.S.-British warplanes Kept up pressure on
the Iraqi military, with a dozen planes bombing a "critical
command and control" base in western Iraq Thursday, September 5.
"It
was bigger than the ones we'd done in the last probably two weeks, but
we've done strikes of that size several times over the last 10 or 11
years," said Brigadier General John Rosa, deputy operations
director of the Joint Staff.
Rosa
said that in Thursday's raid 12 aircraft dropped 25 bombs on the
target, located at a military airfield 380 kilometers (240 miles) west
of and slightly south of Baghdad.
The
Daily Telegraph of London, however, said the raid was the biggest in
four years and involved about 100 U.S. and British aircraft, including
the dozen that dropped precision bombs.
That
attack was seen as a likely prelude to ground action in western Iraq
to suppress Scud missiles aimed at Israel.
Observers
in the Middle East, however, believe that Bush is “going to attack
Iraq eventually”. They also cited the absence of consultations with
Arab moderate countries recently, referring that to one of two
scenarios. The first may be due to the fact that “Bush knows the
sensitivity of the situation to Arab countries, especially Egypt and
Saudi Arabia. So, he wants to save them the embarrassment before their
peoples, given that they will not actually do anything to stop him”.
The
second scenario, according to political analysts, could be that
“Arab countries, especially Egypt and Saudi Arabia, made their
points of rejection (to U.S. strikes on Iraq) in a way too strong to
be altered, one way or the other. So, Bush decided just to ignore
them, for now”.
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