Iraq

Cries of peace, drums of war

Around the world, hundreds of thousands turn out in opposition to an invasion of Iraq even as military action appears increasingly inevitable.

Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times
published March 16, 2003

[AP photo] Emile Maersk joins a peace protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some 5,000 people took part in the rally.

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 even as hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters took to the streets in the United States and around the world.

In Washington, tens of thousands of sun-drenched protesters 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 folk chanted antiwar slogans and heard from dozens of speakers calling on the United States to drop plans to invade Iraq.

Also on Saturday, the New York Times reported that a senior U.S. government official said the Bush administration has identified several Iraqi officials, including Hussein and his two sons, Uday and Qusay, who would be tried for war crimes or crimes against humanity after an American-led attack on Iraq.

Administration officials, the paper reported, said they had planned to send the list to Baghdad with a delegation from the Arab League in hopes of persuading the dozen or so men to leave the country with Hussein as way to avoid a war. But the league, consumed by internal bickering and a brush-off from the Iraqi government, called off the trip, which had been planned for Friday.

Administration officials were making the list public now partly out of frustration, but also as part of the continuing psychological campaign against the Iraqi elite, the New York Times reported. Bush and his senior advisers have repeatedly warned Hussein's loyalists that they have a choice between exile and prosecution.

The list also includes Ali Hassan al-Hamid, who was the governor of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait in 1990-91, and Muhammad Hamza al-Zubaidi, who the administration says was responsible for atrocities against the the Shiites living in southern Iraq in early 1991.

Other Iraqi officials on the Bush administration's short list for prosecution included Aziz Salih Numan, the second governor of Iraqi-occupied Kuwait; Izzat Ibrahim, the deputy commander in chief of the Iraqi military, who is close to Hussein; Abid Hamid al-Tikriti, the presidential secretary who is considered Hussein's alter ego; and Hani Abd al-Latif Tilfah, the director of the special security organization that the administration said is in charge of hiding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

Meanwhile 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 of 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," Capt. Tom McNew, a spokesman for the division's 3rd Brigade, said.

With negotiations for a second U.N. resolution on Iraq at an impasse, diplomats were awaiting the outcome of Bush's meeting today 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.

The Washington Post reported that Bush's aides said the president plans to tell Blair and Aznar that they must end the diplomacy that began with his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 12 in which he called on the world to confront Iraq over its banned weapons programs. The aides said Bush is likely to reject any major changes to the U.N. Security Council resolution backed by the three countries that gave Hussein a March 17 deadline to prove he is disarming, according to the Post. The three leaders could decide to withdraw the measure rather than subject it to certain defeat in the Security Council, the Post said.

Administration officials, the Post reported, said efforts continued to enlist other countries to what Bush has called a "coalition of the willing" to confront Hussein with force.

The Post, again citing administration officials, reported that barring a highly unlikely change of heart, Bush will address the nation as early as Monday night to give Hussein what one called an "ultimatum to avoid war" -- a period of just a few days to give U.N. weapons inspectors, relief officials, journalists and other foreigners, time to leave Iraq before an invasion. An attack could begin any time after that short deadline, according to the Post.

In anticipation of that end to diplomatic efforts, France, Russia and Germany issued a joint declaration Saturday 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 Hussein 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 also signaled Saturday that his country is prepared to go to war without a second resolution.

Britain would prefer a new resolution to demonstrate full international support, but "that may not be possible," he said.

"The prospect of military action is now much more probable," Straw added in a BBC radio interview. "But it is not inevitable. . . . What we're seeking to do still is to pursue this by diplomatic means."

Though several British legal scholars have argued that an invasion would violate international law, Straw maintained that U.N. Resolution 1441, passed in November, gives the British a legal basis for joining a war against Iraq.

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.

-- Information from Knight Ridder was also used in this report.