*"Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq, it was claimed last night.
Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion).
The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President’s Texas ranch.
The White House refused to comment on the report last night.
But, if verified, it is certain to raise questions in Washington and London over whether the costly four-year war could have been averted. "*
Is this possibly true?
What effect will this have on Bush?
What does it say about the real casus belli if there was such an easy out for the belligerent party.
As the article continues and concludes:
*"Only yesterday, the Bush administration asked Congress for another £100billion to finance the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
he total war bill for British taxpayers is expected to reach £7billion by next year.
More than 3,800 American service personnel have lost their lives in Iraq, along with 170 Britons and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
…
Bomb attacks killed 57 people in Iraq yesterday."*
None. He, personally, is beyond reason and isolated from reality. His followers either won’t care or are crazy themselves.
Nothing really. We never had to attack in the first place. Saddam or no Saddam. We had the easiest out of all; we could have simply chosen not to attack.
You are assuming that if such an offer existed and was accepted that this would have prevented the war in Iraq. This is unfortunately not the case. Woodward reveals in ‘Plan of Attack’ that the decision was made by the Bush administration that even in the event of Saddam stepping down and going into exile that coalition forces would still enter Iraq. The rationale for this was that only by occupying the country could it be assured that any new government dismantled the WMD which were after all the pretext for the invasion. Bottom line though is the US is in Iraq because it wanted to be in Iraq.
It seems as though much of the trouble in Iraq has been due to the power vacuum left as a result of Sadamn’s “exit”. I think this would have probably happened even if he’d gone into exile. Plus, you can’t reward thugs in such a transparent way.
After reading the book Cobra II, I’ve come to the conclusion that Saddam simply did not think that an invasion was likely and that he’d do anything to hang onto power. If anything, we know that Saddam liked to talk a bunch of trash – mother of all battles, how Iraq won the 1991 war – and my first suspicion is that this billion dollar offer was just more of the same. All in all, we should have just kept the containment policy going.
**Iraq Debacle could have been avoided for $1 billion? **
Or it could have cost an additional $1 billion. To assume that Hussein would have kept his end of the bargain in a manner acceptable to the payers of said money is, I daresay, naive. If he stepped down at all (rather questionable in my mind), he almost certainly would have arranged to control Iraq by proxy. And totally dismantling his government to get around that would have led to a debacle. As we have seen.
There’s an old saying about stuff like this: Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute.
Generally speaking, I agree with the sentiment. Bribes are a particularly poor way of doing business. Once you give in you have to keep giving in. Look at North Korea, for instance. That said, if we could have avoided this for certain by paying out it might not have been a bad idea, bad precedent notwithstanding.
Why would $1 billion have been appealing to Hussein? Didn’t he already have a larger personal fortune than that stashed away? (I don’t know that, I’m just assuming he would have been able to rake off at least that much from the oil revenue over the years, and would have done so.) Then again, maybe he just balked as a matter of pride at yielding to stick with no carrot.
If he wasn’t willing to step down, why did he make the offer? It was made in secret, not for PR, and presumably he would not have been paid until he was out of the country.
In any case, a post-Saddam Iraq with everything kept more or less as it was would have been preferable to what actually happened. In fact, that was one of the two plans worked out before the war. From Armed Madhouse, by Greg Palast:
“Plan A:”
In February 2001, a meeting organized by Colin Powell’s State Department was held in Walnut Creek, California, in the home of Falah Aljibury, an Iraqi-born consultant on Iraq’s oil industry. The “Three-Day Plan” they came up with was “an invasion disguised as a coup,” “kind of a Marine-supported Bay of Pigs.” Saddam was to be replaced by some Ba’athist general cashiered by him, possibly the exiled General Nizar Khazraji – “the secret group was already contacting Saddam’s generals to switch allegiance. Then, according to their playbook, there would be snap elections, say within 90 days, to put a democratic halo on our chosen generalissimo.”
“Plan B:”
But in November 2001, following the U.S. victory in Afghanistan, the Pentagon, dominated by neoconservative PNAC members Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, had other and very different ideas:
Plan “B” was followed (except for the oil privatization, which U.S. oil companies refused to allow, but that’s another story), and we know how that worked out. But for a mere $1 billion, it now appears, they could have implemented Plan “A” without Americans fighting at all.
Bad precedent? It might have made other dictators eager to sell out and retire. Wouldn’t that be a good precedent?
“Tribute” is something a weaker power pays a stronger to leave it alone. When the stronger power pays the weaker to do what it wants – as an alternative to using military force to make it do what it wants – that’s not tribute, it’s foreign aid.
"There are kooks and cranks and conspiracy nuts out there who think George Bush, from the moment he took office, had some kind of secret plan to invade Iraq and grab control of its oil. They’re wrong.
There were two plans. I’ve got them both. One is 323 pages long, the other 101 pages. "
This is the funniest thing I’ve read, possibly ever!
While Saddam Hussein was a particularly evil monster, I don’t see that having him go into exile would have accomplished what Bush was allegedly trying to accomplish-- regime change in Iraq. As long as the Ba’athists were sustaining a dictatorship in Iraq, it really didn’t matter whether that dictatorship was headed by Hussein or Habib. Getting rid of Saddam was one objective the Bush administration was trying to accomplish, but it was only the first objective. The US would always have wanted to manage the transition to a post-Hussein Iraq, and I don’t see how that could’ve been done without an invasion. It’s not like the Sunnis and former Ba’athists were gong to roll over just because SH abdicated.
n.b.: This is not a commentary on the wisdom of that policy or an indorsement of that policy, just an explanation of where I think the Bush administration was coming from.
Insofar as Iraq was dangerous, it was because of Hussein’s personality and personal agendas. I believe he wanted, ultimately, to be the Sheik of Araby – all of Araby. (His aim in invading Iran was to extend his rule over the Arabs of Khuzestan.) I doubt any of his lieutenants shared his megalomania; it’s a rare thing.
I don’t know if the bribe story is true, but I agree with some others that it would not have accomplished the administrations goals. However I have never had the opinion that their goals were democracy in the middle east. I think the main goals were power for the Bush regime.
A bribe may have achieved the stated goals, but it would not have given billions to Halliburton and the defense industry, and it wouldn’t have given Bush the status of a military leader and the opportunity to strut around on an aircraft carrier in a flight suit under a “Mission Accomplished” banner. It wouldn’t have whipped the country into a patriotic wartime fervor that allows the president to get away with almost anything he wants.
A long time ago I used to think that politics was about doing what was best for the country or the world. Once I recognized that almost all politics is exclusively about the good of the politician, world affairs started to make sense.
Yes, but for it to work, the $1 billion should be earmarked to Bush and Blair. And paid out at the end of their political terms if no war in Iraq. A bargain, considering the money actually spent in Iraq.
[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
Bad precedent? It might have made other dictators eager to sell out and retire. Wouldn’t that be a good precedent?
QUOTE]
Absolutely not! Sure, you get rid of SH, but what happens when Uday and Kusay step up. Give them each a billion?
Then we have revolutions, revolts, and counter-revolutions until the end of time, all with the leaders looking for their billion dollar pay days.
Maybe we could make the payoff contigent upon the number of their own people they have massacred, to give them extra “foreign aid” to get them out of office?
Pol-Pot, Stalin, or Hitler, could have gotten maybe two billion, but lightweights like SH only get a billion. Castro could get about 100 million, Khadifi would get offered 5 million (since he turned around), and Stephen Harper would get two dollars with change given back
Look at the article. Saddam didn’t want us to pay 1billion, he wanted to be allowed to take one billion of his own (or arguably, Iraq’s) money out of the country with him into exile. This wouldn’t be a bribe or tribute, at least anymore then letting him leave the country alive and with part of his wealth intact is a bribe.
No idea if the deal dealt with who would be in charge after Saddam vacated. I suspect that had wiser heads been in charge, we might have come up with a deal that would be neither a US puppet or Uday and Quesy getting to follow in their father’s footsteps. But who knows.
Out of curiousity, is there an English translation of the transcripts that are the source of the article floating around?
