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© St. Petersburg Times, published August 28, 2002
CRAWFORD, Texas -- President Bush told Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States on Tuesday that Saddam Hussein was "a menace and a threat" to both his Middle East neighbors and the United States.
But after a meeting that lasted several hours, Saudi officials said their position was unchanged: that war was not acceptable and that they would not cooperate in any military action.
Bush's meeting with Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the longtime Saudi ambassador and a friend of the Bush family since before the Persian Gulf War in 1991, followed a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney on Monday in which he made the strongest case yet that military action was the only realistic choice to remove Hussein from power.
But the White House said that Bandar was told by Bush that he had still made no decision about whether the United States should proceed with a military overthrow of the Iraqi government.
Bandar came and left Crawford without making any comments, and reporters were kept miles from the session. But after it was over, a Saudi spokesman, Adel al-Jubeir, made the rounds of television shows and reporters to make it clear that the Saudi position about how to deal with Hussein was unchanged.
"There is a process under way with the U.N. to bring the inspectors back in," he said, speaking in Washington. "If it is successful, we can achieve our objectives without firing a single bullet or losing a single life."
In an Associated Press interview in Washington, he said Saudi Arabia was not alone in its objections. "There is no country I know of supporting the use of force in Iraq at this time. Your allies in Europe don't. Your allies in the Middle East don't."
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said Tuesday that Arab leaders would not be able to contain outrage in the street if the United States attacks Iraq.
"We fear a state of disorder and chaos may prevail in the region," Mubarak said in an address to university students in the Mediterranean coastal city of Alexandria.
Mubarak, who sent his troops against Iraq a decade ago as part of the U.S.-led Gulf War coalition, said that this time he had warned the United States against attacking Iraq at a time when Palestinian-Israeli violence is roiling the Arab street.
Iraq sent top officials to Syria and China, as some Arab governments pressed Baghdad to accept the return of U.N. weapons inspectors. Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan dismissed the issue, saying President Bush plans to attack whether or not inspections resume.
Responding to Cheney's speech, Ramadan told reporters in Damascus that the threats were more U.S. "despotism" against Arabs and that the entire Arab world should worry that a U.S. attack on Baghdad would be another sign of U.S. animosity toward Arab states.
"We could not care less about the threats that are out there. Iraq has a long history with these threats and such despotism," Ramadan told reporters during a trip to Syria.
In other developments, a U.S.-British air raid in southern Iraq this weekend destroyed a major military surveillance site that monitors American troops in the Persian Gulf, witnesses said Tuesday.
The U.S. Central Command in Tampa said coalition aircraft used precision-guided weapons to strike two air defense radar systems near Basra "in response to recent Iraqi hostile acts against coalition aircraft monitoring the southern no-fly zone."
-- Information from the New York Times, Associated Press and Washington Post was used in this report.