Bush Chastises Allies for Trying to Give Iraq Time

Increasingly impatient with resistance from key allies, President Bush on Tuesday called their challenges to U.S. policy on Iraq a “rerun of a bad movie” and pledged to take on Saddam Hussein militarily if he does not fully disarm.

“This business about time, how much time do we need to see clearly that he’s not disarming?” Bush said, bristling with irritation.

“He is delaying. He is deceiving. He is asking for time. He’s playing hide-and-seek with inspectors. One thing for sure is he’s not disarming,” the president told reporters after talks with economists on his tax-cutting package. “Surely our friends have learned lessons from the past.... This looks like a rerun of a bad movie, and I’m not interested in watching it.”

The president’s remarks were part of an administration offensive that followed Monday’s announcement by France that it would not yet approve the use of force against Iraq. The offensive was designed to convince the public at home and abroad that Iraq should be disarmed quickly. The campaign included a blistering counterattack against critics of military intervention and the issuance of a 33-page document detailing Iraq’s alleged history of deceit in dealing with the United Nations.

As Bush talked tough, the Pentagon ordered the deployment of two more Navy aircraft carrier battle groups, whose arrival in the Persian Gulf region will double the number of carriers deployed to within striking distance of Iraq.

Defense officials said the administration is considering dispatching two other carriers, critical for naval air power independent of land bases, for a total of six carriers and their support ships. Each carrier holds 70 to 80 warplanes.

The carrier dispatch came on the heels of a Pentagon deployment of an additional 37,000 troops, including elements of the Texas-based 4th Infantry Division. It is the Army’s most modernized infantry division, equipped with the military’s most sophisticated command and control and communications systems.

The new deployment brings the number of troops dispatched to the Persian Gulf and Mediterranean since late December to about 125,000.

Bush vowed, “in the name of peace,” that the United States will keep diplomatic and military pressure on Baghdad until Hussein surrenders all his nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles. Iraq denies that it still has any weapons of mass destruction.

Saying that “time is running out,” Bush said the United States will lead a so-called coalition of the willing to disarm Iraq if it continues to “play hide-and-seek.”

“Make no mistake about that, he will be disarmed,” the president said.

Bush also predicted that the United States will eventually garner wider support, despite growing antiwar protests and polls at home and overseas showing minority support for military action without U.N. backing.

“It is very much like what happened prior to our getting a resolution out of the United Nations. Many of the punditry were quick to say no one is going to follow the United States. And we got a unanimous resolution out of the United Nations,” he said.

The administration launched its public relations offensive in the nervous run-up to two major events next week that could be decisive junctures in the showdown with Iraq. On Monday, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix will deliver his widely anticipated report on Iraqi cooperation to the U.N. Security Council. Bush will give his annual State of the Union speech Tuesday.

Returning to New York on Tuesday after weekend meetings with top Iraqi military officials in Baghdad, Blix said Iraq has imposed heavy conditions on the use of U-2 spy planes to assist the inspections and has still not answered basic questions about gaps in its nearly 12,000-page declaration that was supposed to give a final accounting of its deadliest arms.

Baghdad wants to dispatch its own aircraft to accompany the U-2 planes. It also wants a halt to flights by U.S. and British planes that patrol northern and southern Iraq, a provision in place since 1991 to prevent the regime’s repression of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south.

“In some respects there is not cooperation,” Blix told reporters at Kennedy International Airport. “And in other matters, there is a fair amount of assistance.”

The Swedish diplomat indicated that his report would provide a mixed evaluation. “It will be a description of what we are achieving and the problems we are facing. All the latest things will be in there,” he said.

In contrast, the U.S. position is clearly hardening two months after U.N. inspections resumed.

In one of two major administration speeches scheduled this week, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage said Tuesday that the United States had tried to avoid a war with Hussein, first in agreeing to a cease-fire rather than marching all the way to Baghdad after the 1991 Gulf War and then by tolerating years of disarmament attempts.

But Hussein’s failure to comply with the U.N. inspections resolution passed in November requires the world to “honestly face facts,” Armitage told a meeting at the U.S. Institute of Peace.

The options short of military action, he noted, “are just about exhausted.”

The thrust of the administration’s argument against long-term inspections is that they will never uncover all of Iraq’s hidden weaponry.

As an example, Armitage brought up last week’s discovery of warheads that could have been used for chemical weapons.

“Finding these 16 warheads just raises a basic question: Where are the other 29,984?” he said, referring to the U.N. estimate of how many empty chemical warheads are still missing after inspectors found a dozen and Iraq turned over four more.

“And where are the 550 artillery shells that are filled with mustard gas? And the 400 biological weapons-capable aerial bombs? And the 26,000 liters of anthrax? The botulinum, the VX, the sarin gas that the U.N. said he has? We don’t know, because Saddam Hussein has never accounted for any of it.”

Since Baghdad is refusing to comply, Armitage said, the time is approaching when the world must “have the guts” to take “another course.” Otherwise, there is a danger that Hussein will again procrastinate and wear the world down to “business as usual” that will allow him to keep his deadliest weapons, he said. Iraq maintains that it has no weapons of mass destruction or any program to develop them.

If other nations balk, the United States has “no choice” but to step into the breach, Armitage said. “We will take a stand.”

To back up its public words, the White House’s new Office of Global Communications issued a report titled “Apparatus of Lies” that chronicles Iraq’s alleged “on-the-record” lies, fabricated documents, false claims and fake interviews that the administration says have undermined world determination to eliminate Baghdad’s weapons of mass destruction.

The report, which summarizes previously reported Iraqi transgressions, includes an account of how Hussein’s regime held children’s bodies in cold storage and brought in other bodies from distant cities -- some six to seven months after their deaths -- until there were enough to parade through the streets to protest economic sanctions.

Baghdad said the deaths were all recent and reflected the sweeping impact of the world’s toughest economic embargo on innocent civilians.