Bush: Saddam 'no longer in power'

10.30am

BETHESDA, Maryland - US President George W Bush, emotionally drained from visiting American war wounded, declared today that Saddam Hussein was "no longer in power" in Iraq and warned Syria against accepting escaping Saddam loyalists.

Bush and his wife, Laura, fought back tears as they talked to reporters shortly after seeing about 75 soldiers wounded on the Iraqi battlefields, some of them who lost legs and one who was run over by a 70-tonne tank and now walking around again.

"I don't know if he's dead or alive," Bush said of Saddam, target of a US bombing raid on Monday and whose whereabouts remain unknown. "I do know he is no longer in power."

Bush declared unforgettable the image of the giant statue of Saddam being toppled on Tuesday, which has come to symbolize the fall of Baghdad, but he said it was too soon to say the war was over.

"This war will end when our commanders on the field tell me that the objective has been achieved,' he said in the lobby of Bethesda Naval Medical Centre. He also visited the wounded at Walter Reed Army Medical Centre.

The United States launched the war with the twin goals of ousting Saddam and eliminating Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Saddam's fate is unknown following US attempts to bomb him and there have been no finds of chemical or biological weapons, which Iraq denied possessing.

Washington has accused Syria of helping the Iraqi military and allowing Saddam loyalists to slip into Syria. The US military has issued to troops a list of 55 Saddam followers to be captured or killed.

"Syria just needs to know we expect full co-operation and that we strongly urge them not to allow for Baath Party members or Saddam's families or generals on the run to seek safe haven and find safe haven there," Bush said.

"We expect them to do everything they can to prevent people who should be held to account from escaping into their country. And if they are in their country, we expect the Syrian authorities to turn them over to the proper folks," he said.

The distant war was brought home to Bush as he plied the hallways at both Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals. He awarded 10 Purple Hearts for battlefield wounds and saw a man from Mexico and one from the Philippines sworn in as Americans.

OJ Santamaria of the Philippines, who lives in Daly City, California, was receiving a blood transfusion as he stood and took the oath and was so overcome by pain and emotion that he broke down sobbing.

"I'm proud to have you as an American," Bush told him.

So far, 107 US troops have been killed in the three-week-old Iraq war. A total of 399 American troops have been wounded or otherwise injured, 11 are missing and seven are listed as prisoners of war held by Iraq, the Defence Department said in its daily accounting of war casualties.

The United States is to convene a meeting of Iraqis in the southern city of Nassiriya on Tuesday to discuss the future of Iraq and an eventual interim authority to govern the country.

The meeting, which a US official said was to be chaired by US presidential envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, was expected to be the first in a series Washington aims to organise leading to a Baghdad conference to choose an Iraqi governing authority.

It was expected to include Iraqis from inside and outside the country, including opposition figures and Iraqi emigres who have worked with the United States for months on how to run Iraq after the fall of President Saddam Hussein.

While US military operations continue to defeat remaining Iraqi forces, US officials are turning to creating an Iraqi-led interim authority that they hope will have sufficient legitimacy to win acceptance from the Iraqi people.

The end of Saddam's government has left a power vacuum in the country, with looting and lawlessness plaguing both Baghdad and Iraq's third largest city, Mosul.

The initial civil administration will be run by a US team led by retired Lt Gen Jay Garner but will gradually give way first to the interim authority and then a government chosen by the Iraqis. US officials cannot predict an exact timeline.

"We expect this to be the first in a series of regional meetings that will provide a forum for Iraqis to discuss their vision of the future and their ideas regarding the Iraqi interim authority," said State Department spokesman Richard Boucher of the Nassiriya gathering. "We hope these meetings will culminate in a nationwide conference that can be held in Baghdad in order to form the Iraqi interim authority."

Boucher said participants, invited by Gen. Tommy Franks -- the US officer in charge of the war on Iraq -- would include "Iraqis from newly freed areas" of the country, members of the Iraqi opposition and Iraqis who took part in a long-running State Department project on the postwar future of Iraq.

Despite European and Russian calls for a central United Nations role in administering Iraq after the war, the United States has insisted that it will take the lead and has been vague about exactly what the United Nations might do.

UN spokeswoman Stephane Dujarric said the United Nations would not be represented in Nassiriya, saying: "There will not be a UN person there. Any UN role beyond humanitarian assistance would require Security Council approval."

The United States is seeking to bring together a wide variety of Iraqis to decide who will initially govern a country splintered among the majority Shi'ites, the minority Sunnis who have long ruled and the separatist Kurds in the north.

Asked if it was not a huge challenge to win consensus, a US official replied: "It is, and we recognize that, and that is why we see this as the first of what are expected to be several meetings."

Asked when an interim authority might emerge, he said: "We are hopeful that it will be a matter of weeks."

Khalilzad, the White House official overseeing the meeting, performed a similar function in Afghanistan after US forces toppled the Taleban regime in the autumn of 2001.

That effort led to a December 2001 international conference in Bonn that agreed on an interim government led by Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai, now Afghanistan's president.

In a sign of the difficulties that Khalilzad may face in bringing Iraqis together, a lawyer who works closely with the opposition Iraqi National Congress said he had been invited to Nassiriya and was considering whether to accept.

The lawyer said he would not be keen to attend if there was what he called an excessive emphasis by the organizers on the involvement of tribal leaders.

The British army appointed a tribal leader last week as the head of a fledgling civilian administration in and around Basra, Iraq's second city, prompting dismay among INC officials who complained he was too close to Saddam's Baathist party.

The main Iraqi Shi'ite exile group, the Tehran-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, has said it will boycott the Nassiriya meeting because it disapproves of the US military occupation.

- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq war