Free Republic

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi leaders are wrangling over who should succeed Saddam Hussein as president after they agreed on other key posts in the new government that will take power next month from the U.S. occupation authority. With the top post of prime minister filled and consensus on key ministries, Iraqi officials spoke on Sunday of sharp disagreement on the largely ceremonial choice of head of state between Adnan Pachachi, veteran scion of a pre-Saddam political dynasty, and Ghazi Yawar, a youthful engineer long based in Saudi Arabia. U.S. and U.N. officials may now be ready to propose a third...

AGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 14 — The wild gray beard was gone, and he sat on a metal army cot, just awake from a nap, in socks and black slippers. He was not handcuffed. He did not recognize all his visitors, but they recognized him. That was the purpose of the visit: to help confirm that he was, in fact, Saddam Hussein. What came next in the Sunday afternoon meeting, according to people in the room, was an extraordinary 30 minutes, in which four new leaders of Iraq pointedly questioned the nation's deposed and now captured leader about his tyrannical rule....

Iran demanded on Monday that former Iraqi President Saddam Hoseyn, who led a destructive war against the Islamic Republic between 1980 and 1988, is tried at an international court. "We want that the crimes of Iraq’s dictator are examined at a competent international court and he is put on trial" Government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh told reporters at a weekly press briefing. His comment came more than 24 hours after the announce of the capture of the Iraqi tyrant by American Special Task Forces supported by Kurdish Peshmergas from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of Jalal Talabani, with so far not...

JERUSALEM: A leading candidate to head a caretaker government in Iraq has told Israel Labor Party chairman Shimon Peres that Iraq would likely make peace with Israel if it gives the Palestinians control over 95 percent of the West Bank and Gaza, Peres said Monday. Peres told Israel Radio he had met over the weekend with former Iraqi Foreign Minister Adnan Pachachi, 80, at a Rome conference organized by the Socialist International. A Sunni Muslim with a secular outlook, Pachachi is favored by many American officials to head an Iraqi caretaker government during the post-Saddam Hussein transition period. According to...