Brits Mum On Big Deployments To Iraq

Defense officials on Saturday refused to confirm newspaper reports that Britain soon will send thousands of troops to the Persian Gulf to increase the pressure on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

The Ministry of Defense would not confirm reports in The Daily Telegraph and Chicago Tribune that Britain would order up to 20,000 troops to the Gulf next week.

A ministry spokeswoman said the government was making "contingency plans" for war, but no decision had been taken on military action. However, she said the government "can't rule out
the possibility of a further statement next week."

In Baghdad, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri complained in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that the United States is violating international law by supporting mercenaries against the government of Saddam Hussein, the official daily Al-Iraq reported Saturday.

A team of U.N. weapons experts, meanwhile, went to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul to establish a new office and broaden the range of the inspections. U.N. spokesman Hiro Ueki said in Baghdad the new base "will serve as a convenient location to conduct inspections, particularly in the north."

The UN excursions deep into Iraq's countryside are the latest signs inspectors are turning up the heat, CBS News correspondent Lee Cowan, who is in Baghdad, reported Saturday.

The deadline to report their findings to the UN Security Council is just three weeks away, and the inspectors admit, they still have a long way to go, Cowan pointsd out.

In Vatican City, top Vatican official saidPope John Paul II is "deeply worried" as tensions increase over a possible war in Iraq, adding that no country can act alone to police the world.

The comments by Archbishop Renato Martino, prefect of the Council for Justice and Peace and the Holy See's former U.N. envoy, came amid a series of Vatican criticisms of a possible war in Iraq. In the last two weeks, the pope himself has called for peace in the Mideast, although without explicit reference to Iraq.

On Monday and Tuesday, British ambassadors from around the world will meet in London to discuss Iraq and other issues.

Britain announced in November that six Royal Navy vessels, including the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and a nuclear submarine, will head for the Gulf this month en route to a long-planned exercise in Southeast Asia.

The Daily Telegraph reported Saturday that the government would announce next week it was sending 20,000 troops to the region and calling up 7,000 military reservists. The Times also said the government would call up thousands of reservists. Neither paper cited sources for the information.

On Friday, the Chicago Tribune quoted London-based defense analysts as saying the first of up to 20,000 British troops could start moving to the Gulf by the middle of this month.

There are 50,000 U.S. troops in the Gulf, and tens of thousands more will be deployed within the next few weeks.

The Pentagon was busy working on a massive deployment order that would move 70 to 80,000 more troops into position to invade Iraq, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin.

Counting the forces already in the Persian Gulf and those already on the way, this new order, which is expected to reach Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's desk early next week, would increase to well over 150,000 the number of troops -- everything from foot soldiers to fighter pilots to ammunition handlers -- targeted against Saddam Hussein.

That number would include the Third Infantry division from Fort Stewart, Georgia and marines from Camp Pendeleton, California who will form the nucleus of ground troops ready to invade Iraq from the south.

But the Pentagon's war plans go far beyond that. Still to come, officials say, is another order for 25 to 30,000 troops that would bring the total number of forces to roughly 200,000 and allow the U.S. to invade Iraq not just from the south from the west and north as well.

Britain currently has no ground forces in the region, but a defense expert told The Associated Press thousands probably would be sent to participate in any U.S.-led war.

"It's somewhere between 20,000 and 30,000, almost certainly," said Maj. Charles Heyman, editor of Jane's World Armies.

Heyman said the bulk of a British ground force likely would come from the 25,000 British troops stationed in Germany. He said it would take a month to move the troops to the region, making late February or early March the most likely time for an attack.

"There just aren't enough troops in the Gulf at the moment," he said.

In Sabri's letter to Annan, he cited funds allocated to Iraqi opposition groups and for military training of government opponents, saying these actions violated international charters guaranteeing the sovereignty of individual nations. He called U.S. support for Saddam's opponents an aggression on an independent state, Al-Iraq said.

The newspaper said the letter was delivered to Annan by Iraq's U.N. mission, but it did not say when.

The United States has funneled millions of dollars to Iraqi opposition groups in recent years, and President Bush recently authorized the U.S. Army to train opponents of Saddam's government.

Mr. Bush has threatened to use the American military to disarm Iraq if it does not give up its banned nuclear, biological and chemical weapons as required by U.N. Security Council resolutions. Iraq maintains it has no more banned weapons.

On Friday, Mr. Bush repeated his assertion that Iraq's Dec. 8 declaration to the Security Council that it has eliminated all illegal weapons was not credible. But he also said he only would wage war as a last resort.

Also Friday, Hans Blix, head of the U.N. inspectors searching Iraq for evidence of banned weapons, said the Iraqi government is cooperating with inspectors but there were several issues he wanted to raise during a Jan. 18 visit to the country.

He said there are "questions that have arisen as a result of (Iraq's) long declaration ... and we'd like to follow up some of those."

Blix said last month that Iraq's declaration had not provided sufficient details about its production of missile engines, recovery of 50 destroyed conventional warheads, the loss of 550 mustard gas shells, production and weaponization of the deadly VX nerve agent and its unilateral destruction of biological warfare agents.

On Saturday, U.N. inspectors visited three sites in and around Baghdad and a fourth, the College of Agriculture, in the southern city of Basra, according to Iraqi officials.

The three sites inspected around the capital were the Al-Abour Co., a maintenance arm of Iraq's Military Industrialization Corp.; the Al-Rasheed Co.'s Al-Mamoun Plant, which makes missile propellants and also was inspected Friday; and the Al-Khalis Alcohol factory, which had not been checked before.

The U.N. inspectors must certify that Iraq is free of all weapons of mass destruction, and the means to deliver them, before U.N. economic sanctions on the country can be lifted. The sanctions were imposed by the Security Council after Iraq's 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait.