Steve Quayle News Alerts

July 22, 2003

President George W. Bush fired off a new warning to Syria and Iran, accusing them of harboring terrorists, and confronted a trio of deepening foreign crises in Iraq, Liberia and North Korea.

As he hosted Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi at his Crawford, Texas ranch, Bush said it was time for all governments in the Middle East to support Israel and the Palestinians as they strive to end their conflict.

"This includes the governments of Syria and Iran," Bush said at a press conference he also used to deliver a warm endorsement of the under-fire Italian leader, who backed his war on Iraq.

"Today, Syria and Iran continue to harbor and assist terrorism. This behavior is completely unacceptable," he said.

Ahead of his meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas in Washington on Friday, Bush said states which support terrorism will be "held accountable" and that terrorism undermined the prospects for Middle East peace.

Bush was also faced to confront a quickly worsening situation in Liberia, where dozens of people died in fighting and a shell crashed into the US embassy in the capital, Monrovia.

But he gave no signal on when he would deploy US forces after promising to help a West African peacekeeping operation after sending special forces to secure the embassy.

"We just sent a group of troops in to protect our interests and we are concerned about our people in Liberia," Bush said at a joint press conference with Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

"We continue to monitor the situation very closely, we are working with the United Nations to effect policy necessary to get the ceasefire back in place.

"We are working with ECOWAS to determine when they would be prepared to move in the peacekeeper troops that I have said we would be willing to help move in to Liberia."

Nigeria said Monday it was ready to deploy the vanguard of a west African peacekeeping force to Liberia as soon as regional leaders give it the go-ahead.

The United States has said that it will contribute in some as-yet undefined way to strengthen the west African force, to be set up under the auspices of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

As Bush talked with Berlusconi Sunday and Monday, the recurring issue of North Korea's drive for nuclear weapons thrust itself onto his agenda, following reports the Stalinist state had built a second plutonium processing plant.

He said he believed the crisis could still be solved diplomatically, and pledged to work with regional powers including China, South Korea, and Japan to convince Kim Jong-Il that a "decision develop a nuclear arsenal is one that will alienate you from the rest of the world."

But Bush shrugged off a New York Times report Sunday that sensors set up on North Korea's borders have begun detecting elevated levels of krypton 85, a gas emitted as spent fuel is converted into plutonium.

"The desire by the North Koreans to convince the world that they are in the process of developing a nuclear arsenal is nothing new, we have known that for a while."

North Korea's latest demand comes amid growing signs that the hermit state may respond to calls for multilateral talks to end the nine-month-old nuclear stand-off which began in October last year.

The United States has insisted on a multilateral format for the talks while North Korea is pressing for one-on-one talks with Washington to resolve the crisis.

New challenges from Liberia and North Korea came as Bush aides tried to still a political storm over his use of flawed intelligence alleging Iraq sought uranium for its nuclear program in Africa believed to have originated in Italy.

Berlusconi has denied Italian spies were the source of false data used by Bush in his State of the Union address, but the issue did not come up in a joint press conference given by the two leaders before he left for home.

http://sg.news.yahoo.com/030721/1/3cpyh.html