Iraq Accepts Bush’s Offer to Hold Talks

Iraq has accepted President Bush’s offer to hold talks on the Persian Gulf crisis, the State Department said today.

“The Iraqi government has accepted President Bush’s Dec. 1 proposal to hold meetings between the U.S. government and the Iraqi government,” State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said in a statement.

“We are engaged with them on dates and arrangements for the two meetings,” she said.

Bush had proposed that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein send his foreign minister, Tarik Aziz, to Washington. Then, Bush said, Secretary of State James A. Baker III would go to Baghdad.

In the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires today, Bush said any talks would be mandated by U.N. Security Council resolutions that have been adopted since the crisis began.

“That means no concession of territory. That means freedom of innocent people that are held against their will. . . . And that means the eventual security and stability of the gulf, although that’s not specified by the resolution,” Bush said.

His comments came before the State Department announced that Iraq had accepted the offer to hold talks.

Joe Wilson, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, was called in by the Iraqi Foreign Ministry to be told of Iraq’s acceptance of the offer, the announcement said.

Bush’s unexpected overture followed mounting complaints in Congress that the Administration was rushing into war with Iraq over its invasion of Kuwait without giving diplomacy enough time for the pursuit of a peaceful settlement.

Even so, Bush pledged that the Administration would not waver from the resolution approved last Thursday by the U.N. Security Council threatening a forceful eviction of Iraqi troops if they did not withdraw by Jan. 15.

Bush, in making the offer to swap envoys, said Baker would not waver from the three demands.

“The best way to get that across is one-on-one, Baker looking him in the eye,” Bush said.

The President and Argentine President Carlos Saul Menem held talks today on economic and political issues two days after a bloody Argentine army uprising that killed 13 soldiers and civilians.

Bush, on the third leg of a weeklong Latin American goodwill tour that began in Brazil on Monday, planned to use the daylong visit to promote his scheme to create a vast free trade zone throughout the Western Hemisphere.