In other news regarding Iraq:
* Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz welcomed the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division back to its German base Thursday after an extended, 15-month tour of duty in Iraq, joining with soldiers to pay tribute to 130 comrades killed in the Middle East.
Soldiers representing the division’s individual battalions, brigades and companies lined up in full battle gear, helmets and desert fatigues as the homecoming ceremony opened with a 15-gun salute for Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the head of V Corps and formerly the top military commander in Iraq.
Eight 1st Armored Division soldiers based in the town of Baumholder were killed in a single attack near Baghdad on April 29. The division was supposed to have begun returning home by then, and the extension was a difficult time for service members and families.
* President Bush and his vice president conceded Thursday in the clearest terms yet that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction.
Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney acknowledged more definitively than before that Saddam Hussein did not have the banned weapons that both men had asserted he did – and had cited as the major justification before attacking Iraq in March 2003.
* French President Jacques Chirac considered committing up to 15,000 troops to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq until a dispute over U.N. support scuttled prospects for cooperation, according to a new book.
The book, “Chirac Contre Bush: L’Autre Guerre” (“Chirac vs. Bush: The Other War”), claims Chirac was on the fence about offering French forces as late as January 2003 – two months before the invasion – but balked amid signs that President Bush was bent on war.
* Suitcases full of cash, secret bank accounts, covert operatives, corrupt politicians on the take. A report detailing alleged illicit U.N. oil-for-food deals with the former Iraq government paints a portrait of Hussein as an international gangster – not a nuclear terrorist.
The financial schemes propped up Hussein’s regime for more than a decade and involved cloak-and-dagger efforts to hide the alleged graft by dealing in front companies, untraceable accounts, cash sales and smuggling, the report by the top U.S. arms inspector said.
* The Social Democratic-led opposition in Denmark demanded Thursday that the prime minister apologize for backing the U.S.-led war in Iraq and for contributing Danish troops.
“We have a shared responsibility for a war waged on a false basis,” said Mogens Lykketoft, the leader of the Social Democrats, the largest opposition group. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen “should say, ‘Sorry, we didn’t go to war on the right basis.’”
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