Bush Reaffirms Stance on Hussein

WASHINGTON —  President Bush on Monday renewed his administration’s commitment to ousting Saddam Hussein as the leader of Iraq, but he left open the prospect that something short of a second Gulf War could achieve that goal.

Noting his personal involvement in the military, diplomatic and financial planning to remove Hussein as Iraq’s president, Bush said he would use “all the tools” at his disposal and described his approach as vigilant but not rushed. His comments came amid leaks of the details of a developing Pentagon plan for an invasion of Iraq.

“It’s the stated policy of this government to have a regime change. And it hasn’t changed,” Bush told a White House news conference. “And there’s different ways to do it.... I’m a patient person.”

Hussein has remained a thorn in the side of the United States since early 1991, when Bush’s father, President George Bush, ended the Gulf War without sending U.S. troops into Baghdad to remove the Iraqi leader.

The younger Bush has since authorized clandestine efforts to remove Hussein, even as his administration is debating a military effort to oust him. Military analysts say a flicker of hope remains in some corners that U.S. encouragement could help to foment an internal revolution that would unseat the Iraqi leader.

Some in the Pentagon favor an Afghanistan-style effort to mingle air power with indigenous forces among the ethnic Kurds in northern and southern Iraq, aided by U.S. Army Special Forces troops. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday that U.S. diplomats remain in close contact with Iraqi opposition groups.

Others are skeptical of the Kurds’ ability to take on an Iraqi army that dwarfs the force called forth by the Taliban. Instead, they have called for a massive attack by conventional infantrymen.

Bush declined to comment on news leaks about a plan for 250,000 U.S. troops to attack Iraq on three fronts from bases in Kuwait, or to say whether he intended to force a regime change by the end of his term in 2004. But defense officials and military analysts have cautioned that the classified plan, dubbed Operation Polo Step and originally reported in the New York Times, has not been approved by either Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or the president and is merely one of perhaps a dozen proposals circulating.

Asked about the failure of talks between Iraqi officials and the United Nations last week, in which the U.N. sought renewed inspections of Iraqi weapons facilities, Boucher said Hussein’s government continues to violate the terms of an agreement it entered at the end of the Gulf War. Intelligence reports suggest that Hussein is still developing chemical and biological weapons, both of which are barred.

Any effort to oust Hussein is unlikely this year, analysts say, because the predominantly Muslim nations the administration wants to be part of a coalition against Iraq are preoccupied by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and U.S. soldiers remain embroiled in a dangerous cleanup operation in Afghanistan.

There, American forces continue to seek top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, including the man most wanted by the Pentagon, Osama bin Laden.

“Osama bin Laden, he may be alive. If he is, we’ll get him. If he’s not alive, we got him,” Bush said.