Patience ‘Wearing Very Thin,’ Bush Warns Iraq

President Bush, warning that his patience is “wearing very thin” with reported Iraqi atrocities in Kuwait, said Tuesday that Saddam Hussein’s moves against the Kuwaiti population have “created a new equation in the last three weeks.”

Bush’s remarks at a White House news conference were his most specific to date on allegations that Iraq is trying to systematically loot and depopulate Kuwait. They come at a time when hopes for a diplomatic solution to the Persian Gulf crisis have begun to fade.

Despite the optimism accompanying last week’s U.N. General Assembly meeting, a series of diplomatic missions in the gulf by French, Soviet, Japanese and Arab envoys have all come up dry in recent days. And in an interview, Iraq’s ambassador to Washington said his nation will never agree to even a partial withdrawal from Kuwait.

What Bush termed “the systematic dismantling of Kuwait” is “a new element, one which we did not consider when we first laid out our plans,” a senior Administration official said. “It’s another factor that is forcing itself onto the scene. It has to be looked at.”

Neither Bush nor the senior official would speculate about how much the Iraqi actions in Kuwait might be accelerating U.S. moves toward war. “If your question is how long, I can’t give you an answer in days or months,” Bush said. But he made clear his distress at reports in the media and from outside groups about Iraqi atrocities.

“The brutality that is now being written on by Amnesty International, it’s just unbelievable,” Bush said.

“People on a dialysis machine cut off, the machine sent to Baghdad. Babies in incubators heaved out of the incubators, and the incubators themselves sent to Baghdad. I don’t know how many of these tales can be authenticated,” Bush said, “but I do know when the emir (of Kuwait) came here, he was speaking from the heart” about the looting of his country. “It’s sickening.”

At the State Department, spokesman Margaret Tutwiler said a U.S.-chartered 747 will fly today to pick up 400 Americans who have said they now want to leave Kuwait. The Americans had declined to leave on earlier rescue flights.

The plane is expected to land in Basra, Iraq, to which the Americans will travel by bus from Kuwait, Tutwiler said.

Meanwhile, Iraqi authorities rounded up three more Americans in Kuwait, bringing the total now held hostage by Iraqi authorities to at least 104, Tutwiler said. “We continue to receive reports of house-to-house searches in Kuwait for American citizens,” she added.

At the Pentagon, officials said U.S., British and Australian forces had boarded and diverted to an undisclosed location an Iraqi tanker in the Arabian Sea that was carrying flour and rice to Iraq. Some of the food apparently came from the United States via Jordan, the officials said.

According to Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams, the guided-missile destroyer Goldsborough, the British Royal Navy’s Brazen and the Australian Royal Navy’s Darwin shadowed the Iraqi tanker Tadmur and then took action in the northern Arabian Sea on Monday when the tanker refused to stop for inspection.

At a luncheon interview with reporters and editors from The Times, Iraq’s ambassador, Mohammed Sadiq al Mashat, took a hard line on his country’s continued occupation of Kuwait, insisting that U.S. opposition to Iraq is solely the result of Israeli domination of the U.S. media and politics.

Those Americans who advocate war against Iraq, he said, are putting Israeli needs ahead of U.S. interests and are “not patriots.”