U.S. Agrees to Meetings With Iraqi Dissidents

The State Department’s top Middle East specialist will meet with Iraqi dissidents this week and tell them that the United States will not help them overthrow Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein, it was announced Tuesday.

Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler said that John Kelly, assistant secretary of state for the Near East, will talk today with “a cross-section” of Iraqi opposition leaders in the first of four planned meetings with representatives of the desperate rebels, who may be nearing the end of their fight against the Iraqi dictator.

“The first group will include six Iraqi Muslim intellectuals, both Sunnis and Shias,” Tutwiler said. “Two of the group are American citizens. We will be meeting with Kurdish representatives later in the week.”

She declined to disclose the names of the dissident leaders because, she said, some have families in Iraq who might be subject to reprisals.

By scheduling the meetings, the Bush Administration ended a policy of keeping Iraqi dissidents at arm’s length. Opposition leaders have been complaining for weeks that they have been prevented from appealing directly to U.S. officials for help in ousting Hussein.

But Tutwiler said there will be no change, as a result of the meetings, in President Bush’s basic policy of shunning involvement in the Iraqi civil war.

“The President’s policy is very clear, is very concise,” Tutwiler said. “I have no reason to believe that the President’s policy is going to change.”

She said Kelly “will be articulating America’s policy concerning this situation, which I am sure is very well known . . . to the individuals who are coming.”

In Islamorada, Fla., where he is vacationing, Bush said he is “troubled by the situation in Iraq, this human suffering.” He said he had discussed the situation earlier in the day with Turkish President Turgut Ozal, but he added: “That’s all I can tell you about it.”

However, officials emphasized that Bush is not considering any change in his determination not to go beyond the U.N. Security Council’s mandate to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. Officials said the U.N. mandate never sanctioned a forced change in Iraq’s government.

“We have said 100,000 times (that) it is up to the Iraqi people to decide their future leadership, not for outsiders,” Tutwiler said. “But the very most important thing, I would think, in the minds of all Americans (is) why would you be putting American lives at risk to interject yourself in something that was never a stated goal or objective, either militarily or politically, to somehow change the Iraqi leadership?”

Meanwhile, Tutwiler and Pentagon spokesman Bob Hall said the military situation of the rebels is deteriorating at an alarming rate.

“Iraqi military forces occupy all the major cities (in the southern part of the country),” Hall said.

In the Kurdish north, he said, “the (Iraqi) military has retaken Kirkuk, and we believe it remains in government hands.”