Bush Urges Patience On Iraq

President Bush poured cold water Wednesday on speculation that the U.S. will soon make a military move on Iraq, at the same time that a prominent Republican lawmaker denounced critics of the war option as "appeasers."

Following a meeting of his top defense advisers in Texas, Mr. Bush went out of his way to ridicule media reports that the day's agenda would include planning for a move against Iraq, reports CBS News Correspondent Bill Plante.

"I know there's this intense speculation, a churning, a frenzy ... but the subject didn't come up," Mr. Bush said.

The White House said Wednesday's meeting at Mr. Bush's ranch in Crawford was focused on long-term budget and strategy issues in defense. The president chose to emphasize that there were many methods other than war for replacing Saddam Hussein.

"Regime change (in Iraq) is in the interest of the world," Mr. Bush said. "How we achieve that is a matter of consultation and deliberation."

The president said "I am a patient man and ... we will look at all options and we will consider all technologies available to us and diplomacy and intelligence."

The subject of Iraq may not have come up on the ranch, but in the wake of reservations expressed by prominent Republicans about the wisdom of attacking Iraq now, the White House authorized House Republican Whip Tom DeLay to sound a call to action. Delay denounced criticism of the military option as "wishful thinking and appeasement," and declared the question was not whether to go to war.

"The only choice is between victory and defeat," said DeLay. "And let's be clear, we must choose victory, a victory that cannot be secured at the bargaining table."

DeLay's office said the White House didn't ask him to make the speech, but that he did consult with the National Security Council about it. So if the president was trying to quiet the war talk, he didn't ask the hawks in his own party to do the same.

In advance of the president's session at the ranch, administration aides had taken pains to portray the meeting as a high-level huddle on the future needs of the military, with no space on the agenda for war planning.

Mr. Bush said the discussion centered on ways to "better protect ourselves and our allies from the true threats of the 21st century" and to "shape a new philosophy in the Pentagon."

Still, most of the questions during a news conference after the session dealt with Iraq.

As to recent suggestions by several major U.S. allies, including Germany and Canada, that they would not join the United States in a military strike against Iraq unless a better case could be made, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said "the president has not asked them to."

Rumsfeld, standing alongside the president, said that the coalition that Mr. Bush had assembled in the global war on terrorism "is broad, it's deep, it's impressive and it is in fact what is helping the forward progress that we're achieving."

Mr. Bush said that U.S. plans for a missile defense were among the topics discussed.

The president also was asked about reports of the death of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal in Baghdad earlier this week. "No terrorist can hide forever," Mr. Bush said.

At the same time, the president voiced open skepticism about reports from Iraqi and Palestinian officials about the circumstances of his death.

"They said he committed suicide with four bullet holes to the head, so I'm not quite sure how he died. We just have to make sure he died," he said.

Also taking part in the military meeting were Vice President Dick Cheney, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, White House chief of staff Andrew Card and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers.

On the official to-discuss list were the 2004 defense budget, the direction of missile defense programs since U.S. withdrawal from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the president's desire to reshape priorities to reflect modern-day war realities – a transformation that could include cutting expensive, politically popular aircraft programs.

Rumsfeld on Tuesday described the meeting as a routine effort to update the president, who is spending a month-long working vacation at his 1,600-acre spread.

Likewise, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer has noted that Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. military commander in the theater of any future Iraq action, was not invited. He also pointed out a similar broad-based Pentagon planning session involving essentially the same people last August during Mr. Bush's Texas vacation.

The military's focus shifted in the aftermath of Sept. 11 from long-range thinking to the more immediate concerns of protecting Americans, Fleischer said.

"This is an attempt now to make certain that we're doing both," he said.