Steve Quayle News Alerts

October 15, 2002

Stuffing ballots into boxes by the fistful, Iraqis mustered Tuesday for a vote choreographed by the state as a show of support for Saddam Hussein.

"I am voting not for Saddam, because my vote for Saddam was determined long ago, but I am voting against America and Britain," voter Abdul Munaim said in Baghdad.

Hoping to prove the U.S. wrong and illustrate what a popular leader Saddam Hussein is, the Iraqi government expects the highest possible percentage of "yes" votes in Tuesday's presidential referendum.

In the last referendum, on October 15, 1995, Saddam received 99.96 percent of the vote. This time, authorities are looking for a greater percentage.

Saddam is the only candidate on the ballot.

The White House dismissed the one-man race. "Obviously, it's not a very serious day, not a very serious vote and nobody places any credibility on it," press secretary Ari Fleischer said in Washington.

For weeks, state television and radio have aired a constant pitch for people to grant the Iraqi leader another seven-year term. His Baath Party has staged neighborhood-by-neighborhood rallies and vote drives built around the slogan "Yes, Yes, Yes Saddam"

"All Iraq is for Saddam. He is our leader and our father," said one voter, showing off a ballot stamped "yes" in a thumbprint of blood.

"I came to put my paper in the box and to say I don't want America to come here, and to say I hate Bush, because he wants to attack me," Dr. Ahmed Jawad, a parasitologist, said in a village outside Tikrit.

Iraq projected more than 11 million of Saddam's 22 million people would turn out for the referendum. The vote was a 'yes' or 'no' on Saddam staying president for another seven years and on continuing the coup-installed, three-decade reign of Saddam's party.

Meanwhile, President Bush kept up the verbal attacks on Saddam by accusing him Monday of wanting to use al Qaeda as a "forward army" against the West, pointing to the Indonesian car bombing as fresh evidence of the need to stamp out the terror network.

"We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al Qaeda to do his dirty work, to not leave fingerprints behind," Mr. Bush said Monday at a rally for Michigan's Republican candidates.

"This is a man who we know has had connections with al Qaeda. This is a man who, in my judgment, would like to use al Qaeda as a forward army," he added.

The president warns that if the U.S. and the U.N. don't disarm Saddam, he becomes a greater threat, reports CBS News White House Correspondent Mark Knoller. And if the U.S. doesn't act, Mr. Bush says people might ask why the U.S. government didn't force Iraq to disarm.

Getting the United Nations to act may be difficult. France, China and several other members of the U.N. Security Council remain opposed to a U.S.-backed resolution on the best way to disarm Iraq despite renewed negotiations and concessions by the Americans.

French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin reaffirmed on Monday that Paris is opposed to unilateral U.S. military action and urged the Bush administration to "remain faithful to the vision of collective security that rests on the law."

"America seems tempted by the solitude of power," he told the Institute for National Defense Studies, a think tank in Paris. "We cannot accept an intervention that is not a last resort, the final resort."

France has led opposition to giving the Bush administration a green light, instead favoring two U.N. resolutions — a first toughening U.N. inspections and a second authorizing action against Iraq if it fails to comply.

Council diplomats said Monday they did not believe the United States and Britain have enough support in the 15-member Security Council for a resolution that would give a green light for the use of force in Iraq. To win approval, a resolution must get nine "yes" votes and must not be vetoed by a permanent member.

President Bush has not provided concrete evidence of a link between al Qaeda and Saddam. But as he seeks the United Nations resolution giving Iraq one last chance to disarm or face U.S.-led action, he is warning of such a link, and the danger it would pose.

"I know the threats," Mr. Bush said of al Qaeda. "The threats should be vivid in everybody's mind, after seeing pictures of the devastation, the size of the bomb crater, the absolute needless murder, that took place in Indonesia." More than 180 people, including two Americans, died in the attack there on Saturday.

Mr. Bush called attacks in Indonesia, Kuwait and Yemen part of a grim pattern of terror, and said "We've got a long way to go" to defeat Osama bin Laden's global network. But he said America can fight Iraq and al Qaeda simultaneously.

Nearly 12 million Iraqis are expected to cast ballots at 1,905 polling stations in 72 districts; voting booths are separate for men and women in line with Islamic segregation of the sexes.

Most polling stations are schools plastered with posters of the leader. To encourage voter turnout, sherbets, cookies and hot tea are served, and children put on shows of patriotic songs.

Iraq has sought to picture the vote as a defense of homeland to counter U.S. pressure for a war to drive Saddam from power. On Monday, President Bush called Iraq "part of the war on terror" as he decried the attacks in Yemen, Kuwait and the resort island of Bali.

At an election eve rally in Baghdad's People's Stadium, Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan condemned the United States over reported plans for a post-Saddam military occupation of Iraq — saying it showed the Bush government as a "crazy and evil administration."

Sitting at the door of his house in Kerbala, 75 miles south of Baghdad, Ali Ahmed Abdul Munaim waited for the school across the road to open so he could vote "and get it over with," as he put it.

"I am voting not for Saddam, because my vote for Saddam was determined long ago, but I am voting against America and Britain," Abdul Munaim told The Associated Press Tuesday morning.

"We are voting for our country and our dignity. Saddam is one of us — he was not forced by international powers to run the country," Hikmat Sadoun said while waiting his turn to vote at a polling station in Mahmoudia, 25 miles south of Baghdad.

"When he became president in 1979, we looked at him as the young challenging man and we still do," he added.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/11/attack/main525210.shtml