U.S. claims contact with Iraqi troops, elite guard

U.S. claims contact with Iraqi troops, elite guard

Will Dunham, Reuters, Washington

The United States on Thursday said it was in touch with Iraqi
forces, including members of Saddam Hussein's elite Republican
Guard, over what they had to do to surrender without a fight.

"There are communications in every conceivable mode and
method, public and private, to the Iraqi forces that they can act
with honor and turn over their weapons and walk away from them
and they will not be hurt," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
said after an appearance before members of Congress.

"Conversely anyone who engages in the use of weapons of mass
destruction or supports that regime will wish they had not," he
added.

U.S. defense officials have previously described
communications with the Iraqi military at all levels, but have
offered few details.

Rumsfeld said the communications had involved contacts with
the Republican Guard and with the Special Republican Guard units
thought to be most loyal to Saddam.

Those troops are expected to form the last line of defense
around the Iraqi capital against invading U.S. and British
forces.

Rumsfeld said the United States still hoped the Iraqi
president, target of the first cruise missiles fired at Baghdad
on Wednesday, would be gone before the war reached full pitch.

"The pressure is continuing on the Iraqi regime and it will
not be there in a period of time. And we still hope that it is
possible that they will not be there without the full force and
fury of a war," Rumsfeld said on Capitol Hill.

Earlier, in comments at a news briefing that were broadcast
into Iraq, he urged the Iraqi military to listen to U.S. radio
broadcasts into the country for instructions on how to be spared
in a military onslaught "of a force and scope and scale that has
been beyond what has been seen before."

Rumsfeld, speaking at the Pentagon, said Iraqi soldiers and
officers had to choose between dying for a doomed regime or
surviving to help rebuild Iraq. Any soldier who followed orders
to use chemical or biological weapons, which Iraq denies it has,
would be treated as a war criminal.

"If Saddam Hussein or his generals issue orders to use weapons
of mass destruction, whether on coalition forces, free-Iraqi
forces, neighboring countries or innocent Iraqi civilians, as
they have done before, those orders should not be followed,"
Rumsfeld said.

"Do not follow orders to destroy dams or flood villages. Do
not follow orders to destroy your country's oil, which is the
Iraqi people's, and they will need it to rebuild their country
when that regime is gone," he said.

The Pentagon earlier this month announced plans to use
soldiers in the regular Iraqi army for paid work on key
reconstruction tasks in postwar Iraq, including engineering, road
construction, work on bridges and clearing land mines.

American warplanes dropped millions of leaflets on southern
Iraq this week, many of them giving precise instructions to Iraqi
soldiers on how to surrender safely.