Iraq

President Bush says he is increasingly pessimistic that Iraq's Saddam Hussein will dismantle his country's clandestine nuclear weapons program and is pressing a 48-hour deadline for Iraq to comply with U.N. demands, or take action to force the issue.The Evening Sun wants to know if you think Iraq should be given a deadline or whether the United Nations should be given more time to work out a solution.Call SUNDIAL, the Baltimore Sun's telephone information system, on a Touch-Tone phone. The call is local, and answers will be registered between 10 a.m. and midnight.

Hussein Iraq's highest court rejected Saddam Hussein's appeal yesterday and said the former dictator (right) must be hanged within 30 days for ordering the killing of scores of Shiite Muslims in 1982. Aref Shahin, chief judge of the appeals panel, said there was no further legal recourse for Hussein, and the Iraqi executive is free to send him to the gallows "any day." Pg 11A Deaths Three U.S. soldiers were killed, bringing the number of members of the U.S. military killed since the start of the Iraq war in March 2003 to at least 2,978 -- five more than the number killed in the Sept.

PRESIDENT BUSH made positive steps toward internationalizing the postwar effort in Iraq by calling on U.N. special envoy Lahkdar Brahimi to help design an interim government to assume sovereign control of Iraq on July 1 and announcing that he was sending an emissary to Iraq's neighbors. But as the challenges of the next year loom even larger and more troubling, Mr. Bush should plan for after July 1 by bringing in more partners and making Iraq a truly international effort, thereby maximizing his chances for success.

While American soldiers won a decisive military victory ove Iraq last March, U.S. businesses lost big. Iraq's repudiation of its commercial obligations cost American firms millions of dollars, even as our troops returned home triumphant. U.S. creditors of Iraq are caught in a new Bermuda Triangle, extending from recalcitrant Iraqis to United Nations bureaucrats, and presided over by officials of our own government.Immediately after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, President Bush froze Iraqi assets in the United States under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act. Iraq retaliated by suspending debt payments to the U.S., and Baghdad's Revolutionary Command Council passed a law effectively prohibiting payment of the obligations owed by Iraq and its citizens to foreigners.

THE BEST ARGUMENT in favor of trying to hold elections in Iraq next month may have come from the streets of Kiev. The Ukrainian vote was terribly flawed -- brazenly unfair, in fact -- yet it was the very mechanism of the election that gave the Orange revolutionaries something concrete to protest. There was a clear-cut process, and it didn't work, and that spurred the Ukrainian opposition to turn out to seek specific redress. The election results provided a forum for their dissent, and that dissent, moreover, was within the larger system -- and was itself legal.

The United States did not push the Persian Gulf war to the logical end last year because, among other things, it opposed dismembering Iraq, as did its Arab allies. Their fear was that a voracious Iran would gobble up either the Kurdish north or the Arab Shiite south, both areas full of petroleum installations.But the United States had also opposed dismembering Yugoslavia. Now it recognizes that dismemberment and the breakaway republics. And it stands poised to protect the de facto dismemberment of Iraq by aerial dogfights if necessary, to protect a Shiite insurrection it does not sanction.

A year after suffering one of history's more lopsided military defeats, Saddam Hussein is still making trouble for George Bush.His tenacious hold on power in Iraq and his intransigence in the face of formidable pressure to dismantle his strategic weapons production capabilities suggest that the president's work in the Persian Gulf was left dangerously unfinished. Coupled with recently leaked evidence of administration support for Iraq that continued nearly until the invasion of Kuwait, and indications that Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf may have been restrained from completing the destruction of Iraqi forces during the war, the outline of an apparent "soft line" toward Mr. Hussein emerges.

PRESIDENT BUSH insists that he doesn't have a war plan for Iraq on his desk. Well then, it must be in his top drawer. How else to explain the trumpeting by top White House officials of the need to act decisively against Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, even as prominent Republicans -- most recently, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III -- call on the president to exercise caution? Vice President Dick Cheney is the latest administration heavyweight to promote the case for a pre-emptive strike against Baghdad.

Kayden Hoskins can say "Daddy" now, but she could not when her father, Spc. Tom Hoskins of the Maryland National Guard, left for Iraq in February. The 15-month-old from Havre de Grace has known Daddy mostly as a voice on the phone, a man reading her a book on a DVD sent from far away, a face in a framed photograph that on occasion she kisses. Dressed in a pink winter jacket, brown knitted hat and pink wool gloves, Kayden turned up Saturday morning with her mother, Nicole, and her paternal grandparents to join the crowd of several hundred family members and friends welcoming home troops of the 1729th Forward Support Maintenance Company.