On the Illegitimacy of the Bush War on Iraq

The following document is from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/02/15/wirq15.xml

Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi deputy prime minister, sought the Pope's mediation during an audience in Vatican City yesterday in an apparent last-ditch attempt to postpone war.

Mr Aziz, a reportedly devout Chaldean Catholic, who is due in Assisi today to "pray for peace", was swept amid tight security into a Vatican entrance used for heads of state in a vehicle wedged into a 10-car motorcade.

He spent 20 minutes with the Pope - who is strongly opposed to a war against Iraq - in John Paul II's library in the late morning, and then met senior Vatican figures for 40 minutes.

The Vatican said later that Mr Aziz had "wanted to give assurances of the Iraqi government's wish to cooperate with the international community, in particular with regard to disarmament.

"On the part of the Holy See," it added, "it was reiterated that the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council - the guarantors of international legality - had to be faithfully respected".

But sources said Mr Aziz had also given the Pope a letter from Saddam Hussein denouncing the "war of aggression" and asked him to instigate new mediation to spare his country.

Mr Aziz's audience was the key meeting on his agenda since his arrival in Italy on Thursday. But today's trip to Assisi - the capital of peace - will provide him with an equally important media opportunity on a day when millions will march for peace around the world.

Brother Enzo, who is handling the media, is exhausted and has a mobile phone forever pressed to his ear. A fraught-looking Brother Pancrazio is in charge of security.

Hectic preparations for Mr Aziz's arrival in Assisi, where at the friars' invitation he will "pray for peace" before St Francis's tomb, have upset the calm of the picturesque Umbrian town.

They have also exposed the friars to accusations in Italy and abroad that by welcoming the henchman of a murderous dictator at such a crucial time they are handing Iraq a propaganda tool.

The friars reply that by opening their doors to everyone - even to the Wolf of Gubbio, which St Francis famously tamed - they are only following the philosophy of their founder.

"There is huge media interest," Brother Enzo, spokesman for the Franciscan community, said. "We've had to open three press centres and Italian state television will cover the event live."

He described the visit as a "pilgrimage of prayer in the spirit of last year's meeting in Assisi" where the Pope convened world religious leaders to pray for peace.

The key moments will consist in prayers by Mr Aziz and some 15 Franciscans, and local religious and lay leaders, before St Francis's tomb below in the religious community's complex. An oil-burning "lamp of peace", a replica of one left by the Pope on the tabernacle before the tomb of St Francis, will be lit and given to Mr Aziz.

An ivory horn which the Egyptian Sultan Melek-elKamel gave to St Francis in 1219, and which the saint used to summon the faithful, will be laid on the altar as "a symbolic gift".

The horn, which will remain in Assisi, was an "invitation", the friars said, "to conversion to God by purifying the heart and the mind."

Mr Aziz will then join the friars in the refectory for a simple lunch.

The Franciscans reject claims that inviting Mr Aziz to pray for peace and giving him a gift amount to a recognition of Saddam's regime. "That's wrong," Padre Vincenzo Coli, the superior of the religious complex, said. "By presenting the lamp we want to remind Mr Aziz that each believer has a commitment to be the light of peace."

Padre Coli hoped that with Mr Aziz's visit, the Wolf of Gubbio could again be tamed. "The story was always told as if it were a real wolf, which was dangerous but tamed by St Francis, who gave it food.

"But historians believe the 'wolf' was an evil man who was converted by St Francis and began doing good works."

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