Turkish officials agree to deployment of U.S. troops

Turkey's Cabinet agreed Monday to the deployment of tens of thousands of U.S. combat troops for a possible war in Iraq, ending weeks of tense negotiations, the Associated Press reported.

A government spokesman said the measure would be sent to parliament Monday with a vote expected Tuesday. The announcement comes as U.S. ships loaded with tanks and other armor awaited orders off the Turkish coast. Turkey has been holding out for weeks for a better aid package to compensate for any Turkish losses in case of war. The deadlock was finally broken late last week, when Washington offered Turkey $5 billion in aid and $10 billion in loans.

The United States and Britain plan to introduce a resolution Monday declaring Iraq in further violation of U.N. orders to disarm, but does not contain benchmarks or set a deadline. A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said a vote on the resolution is expected by mid-March. French President Jacques Chirac announced that France, Germany and Russia submitted a proposal today to the United Nations for step-by-step disarmament of Iraq, part of a European drive to counter U.S. pressure for military action.

Meanwhile, U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro Monday in Boston dismissed a lawsuit filed by six Democratic House members seeking an injunction to stop President Bush from launching a war against Iraq.

The lawsuit maintained that only Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war, and that the resolution it approved last October supporting military action against Iraq did not declare war and unlawfully ceded that decision to Bush. But Tauro said the lawsuit engaged "political questions in the legal sense that are beyond the jurisdiction of the court."