*EPF203 09/03/2002
Defense Department Report, September 3: Iraq, Afghanistan Operations
(U.S. will lay out Iraq policy in coming weeks, Rumsfeld says) (560)

U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says President Bush will lay out evidence of the threat posed by the regime of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in the coming weeks, including a briefing of key legislative leaders at a morning meeting at the White House September 4 and testimony to be delivered at upcoming congressional hearings.

"What the president wants to do, and will do in his own time, is to provide information he feels is important with respect to any judgment he decides to make," Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon briefing September 3. As yet, President Bush has not made a final judgment on how to deal with Iraq, he said.

"The policy of our government has been [a] regime change" in Iraq that deposes Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld said. "It's been regime change by the Congress, by the successive executive branch over the past two administrations."

Rumsfeld said the desire to see such a change in Iraq is rooted in several factors, including the belief that "the world would be a better place if there were a government in that part of the world that was not developing weapons of mass destruction, was not on the [state-sponsored] terrorist list, did not pose threats to its neighbors, did not repress its people and subject its minorities to abuses, and did not have any development of weapons of mass destruction."
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said during a briefing September 3 that the president would not act on his own with regard to Iraq. "The president is going to consult with leaders in Congress, he will consult with our allies, he'll consult with members of Congress to determine what the appropriate next step is," Fleischer said.
Rumsfeld said some of the appropriate discussions by administration officials on Iraq would likely be held during planned congressional hearings this month.

The United States continues to insist that Iraq permit U.N.-sponsored arms inspection teams to resume unfettered inspections throughout the country for weapons of mass destruction as agreed to after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Rumsfeld said. U.N. arms inspectors, assigned to find Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, withdrew from Iraq in December 1998 and have never returned.

"It is the Iraqis that ended the inspections. That we all know. We protested when the Iraqis threw the inspectors out," Rumsfeld said. "The Iraqis made a conscious decision to tell the international community that the arrangement that they had entered into at the end of the Gulf War involving inspections, and the other undertakings with respect to not developing weapons of mass destruction and the like -- they made a conscious decision at various points to negate those agreements, to tell the international community that they no longer would abide by them."

Air Force General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during the Pentagon briefing that, over the past month, U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan have found several weapons caches, including five truckloads of 82 mm. mortar rounds, 107 mm. rockets, machine-gun rounds, 105 mm. tank rounds, aerial rockets, and small-arms ammunition.

"We also recovered some caches totaling three truckloads of RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] rounds, rockets with fuses, heavy ammunition and anti-personnel, anti-tank mines," he said.

Myers noted that on August 31 a U.S. combat patrol was attacked between Jalalabad and Asadabad with a command-detonated mine. "The explosion occurred five meters in front of the convoy, but there were no U.S. casualties," he said.

(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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