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Originally posted by Replaced_Texan
Does anyone have an opinion on the reports coming from the New York Times and the Newsweek about a last minute effort by Iraq to make a deal to avoid war?
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Er, is it just me or didn't reports of the underlying deal negotiations come out (albeit not in the mainstream US press) in the weeks before we invaded? This is seriously old news (though, I admit, the stuff naming US officials who participated directly in negotiations is new). There were also last-minute backdoor negotiations by various third parties and interested nations with the heads of the Iraqi security services about staging a last-minute internal coup, and one through private individuals with reps of Saddam's family. There was one possible deal on the table, I believe, that was indirectly brokered by the French, and I believe a proposed Saudi deal did get some airtime.
My recollection is that none of the proposed deals contemplated turning Saddam over for trial, they all involved his exile to a "neutral" third country. There was wide speculation as to whether Russia would accept him in exchange for the big bucks, since the more obvious default dumping ground (Sudan) was already the object of fairly intense US scrutiny and intelligence activity.
In any event, this stuff was pretty widely leaked at the time (whether it was this specific negotiation or three or four that looked just like it), and everyone knew they would go nowhere because none of them satisfied the widely know and widely unacknowledged strategy of the American admin w/r/t Iraq: get a large military presence in the Middle East fast to put serious-ass pressure on the local non-cooperating countries. The only real questions were what embarrassment the negotiations might cause the Admin for pressing forward when it did, given the fact that they never made any effort to make the public understand the real geopolitical reasons for the invasion.
