Heavyweights of Bush's party line up against Iraq invasion

By ANDREW GUMBEL in Los Angeles

The Bush Administration's plans to go to war against Iraq are causing disquiet among leading members of the President's Republican Party.

The names who have expressed scepticism or outright opposition to a military invasion could not be more high-profile.

They include Henry Kissinger, the primary architect of American foreign and security policy during the second half of the Cold War, Brent Scowcroft, who was national security adviser to George Bush Snr and is still close to the Bush family, and Lawrence Eagleburger, another veteran from the Reagan-Bush era.

Congressional critics include Dick Armey, the influential House majority leader, and Chuck Hagel, a senator from Nebraska regarded as an intelligence and security expert.

All are asking the same questions - whether the Administration has thought through the knock-on effects of an invasion, whether an attack might make Saddam Hussein more inclined to use weapons of mass destruction if he has them, and what plans have been made for a post-war settlement to stop the US being drawn into a colonial occupation.

And all are pressing the Bush Administration to make its case more clearly and rely less on demonising Saddam.

Scowcroft, writing in the Wall Street Journal, said a war risked undoing all the Administration had set out to do since September.

An attack on Iraq "would seriously jeopardise, if not destroy, the global counter-terrorist campaign we have undertaken".

It also opened the possibility of an exchange of chemical and nuclear weapons between Iraq and Israel and "Armageddon in the Middle East".

Speculation is widespread that because of his closeness to the first Bush Administration, Scowcroft was acting as an ambassador for the President's father, begging the younger George Bush to think again. Eagleburger told ABC Television the Administration had no evidence that the Iraqis were close to having or using weapons of mass destruction.

"I don't know why we have to do it [the invasion] now, when all our allies are opposed to it," he said.

Kissinger, writing in the Washington Post, was more sympathetic to the Administration's desire to end Saddam's regime.

But he criticised the Administration's apparent proclivity for solving geopolitical problems with military might alone, saying it should "work towards an international system that rests on more than military power".

- INDEPENDENT