The Bush administration on Wednesday dismissed a compromise proposal by Canada to set an end-of-March deadline for Iraq to comply with U.N. disarmament demands.
After Secretary of State Colin Powell conferred by telephone with Foreign Minister Bill Graham, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said the proposal “only procrastinates on a decision we all should be prepared to take.”
Boucher recalled other governments tried earlier to set a deadline for Iraq. But he said, in the meantime “we have heard from inspectors again, again and again” that Iraq had not agreed to fully disarm.
Earlier, President George W.Bush offered to Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien “a resolution that he thinks is the way to go,” said spokesman Ari Fleischer. “He’s confident in the end that his position will be accepted and voted on,” Fleischer said of the president.
Bush also called Prime Minister Peter Medgyessy of Hungary, a country which has supported the U.S. position, to thank him for that backing. Bush noted that the Hungarian parliament voted to authorize the transit of U.S. equipment through Hungary, Fleischer said.
As the administration pressed for a vote on a U.S.-British-Spanish resolution designed to back the use of force to disarm Iraq, Bush called Saddam Hussein “a master of disguise and delay” and mocked the Iraqi leader for disclosing some weapons that he’d previously denied were in his arsenal.
“The danger with Iraq is that he can strike in the neighborhood and the danger with Iraq is that he has got the willingness and capacity to train al-Qaida type organizations and provide them with equipment to hurt Americans,” Bush said.
Meantime, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff, Aleksander Voloshin, held a third day of meetings with senior U.S. officials. Since Monday he has talked to Vice President Dick Cheney, Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s national security adviser. Bush dropped into the Rice meeting.
Bush also stepped into a meeting with President Geidar Aliev of Azerbaijan, a country 250 miles northeast of Iraq, which has backed the U.S. call for Iraq’s disarmament.
Amid indications that Russia could be moderating its opposition to forcibly disarming Iraq, Boucher called the hour-long Powell-Voloshin meeting “very, very good” and said “we will see if there is an opportunity to narrow the gap.”
Bush was to give a speech on Iraq Wednesday at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank from which he drew many of his aides. He was expected to argue that getting rid of Saddam would make the Middle East more stable.
Offering Congress and the American public a peek into war and postwar preparations, the Army’s top general said Tuesday that a military occupying force could total several hundred thousand soldiers.
Iraq is “a piece of geography that’s fairly significant,” Gen. Eric K. Shinseki said at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Any postwar occupying force, he said, would have to be big enough to maintain safety in a country with “ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.”
And in a speech prepared for Wednesday delivery to the Council on Foreign Relations, Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., was calling on the Bush administration to work with the United Nations to name an international administrator to oversee reconstruction of Iraq.
A U.S. civilian administrator “would put America in the position of an occupying power, not a liberator,” said Lieberman, who is running for the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. “And it may well widen the gulf between the United States and the Arab world.”
In northern Iraq, which was pried from Saddam’s control to protect Kurdish civilians after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, White House and State Department officials were holding a meeting with political opponents of Saddam’s government. The aim was to help plan the kind of government that would take over in Baghdad after an ouster of Saddam.