The UN, US and Iraq IV

Claim: Former President George Bush wrote that trying to eliminate Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War in 1991 would have "incurred incalculable human and political costs."
Status: True.

Example: [Collected on the Internet, 2003]


In his memoirs, A World Transformed, written more than five years ago, George Bush, Sr. wrote the following to explain why he didn't go after Saddam Hussein at the end of the Gulf War:

"Trying to eliminate Saddam .. would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible ... We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq ...there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land."

If only his son could read.

Bush's reckless rush to war
NYT Saturday, November 8, 2003
To appreciate the significance of James Risen's article in Thursday's New York Times (IHT, Nov. 7) about an 11th-hour Iraqi peace offer last March, it helps to think back to that period. For months the Bush administration had been arguing that the only hope of disarming Baghdad was to steadily ratchet up the threat of an imminent American invasion. Only at that point, Washington asserted, might Saddam Hussein yield to the demands of repeated UN Security Council disarmament resolutions.
.
The article shows that such reasoning may well have been sound. With American forces massed and ready to invade, the Iraqis suddenly expressed interest in meeting their obligations. Yet the article also shows that the administration seems not to have been serious about the idea of a coerced but peaceful solution at the very moment it may have been a realistic possibility.
.
The offer described in the article was conveyed to the Pentagon by a Lebanese-American businessman who said he had been sent by the chief of Iraq's Intelligence Service. The Iraqi message was that Baghdad no longer had any unconventional weapons and that it was willing to let American troops and experts conduct a search to prove this. The envoy also conveyed an offer to turn over a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and relayed an Iraqi pledge to hold elections.
.
By March, Washington's military and political preparations for war were complete. The Bush administration was then showing little patience for diplomacy or anything else that might delay what it envisioned as a swift and easy military triumph, with jubilant Iraqis cheering American troops, a model Middle Eastern democracy rising in Baghdad, reconstruction paid for by Iraqi oil revenue and no lengthy military occupation.
.
Iraq has not worked out as planned in the last seven months. As President George W. Bush frankly acknowledged Thursday, a democratic outcome is still far from assured. Yet even without resorting to hindsight, the Bush administration can be faulted for not making more of an effort to determine whether a satisfactory resolution of the weapons issue might have been achieved without war. Put differently, Washington should have put to the test its own words about using the threat of force to coerce concessions.
.
With crucial details unexplored, there is no way of knowing whether war could or should have been avoided, or indeed whether the offer was genuine or what kind of inspections would have been allowed. Any last-minute offer might have been unacceptable, particularly if it meant leaving Saddam's Baathist torturers in power. Yet surely Washington should have made the effort to learn more.
.
Administration supporters were fond of saying at the time that there were things Bush officials knew but could not share with the public. Little did we imagine that among those things was an offer that might have provided a way to avoid the war.

< < Back to Start of Article To appreciate the significance of James Risen's article in Thursday's New York Times (IHT, Nov. 7) about an 11th-hour Iraqi peace offer last March, it helps to think back to that period. For months the Bush administration had been arguing that the only hope of disarming Baghdad was to steadily ratchet up the threat of an imminent American invasion. Only at that point, Washington asserted, might Saddam Hussein yield to the demands of repeated UN Security Council disarmament resolutions.
.
The article shows that such reasoning may well have been sound. With American forces massed and ready to invade, the Iraqis suddenly expressed interest in meeting their obligations. Yet the article also shows that the administration seems not to have been serious about the idea of a coerced but peaceful solution at the very moment it may have been a realistic possibility.
.
The offer described in the article was conveyed to the Pentagon by a Lebanese-American businessman who said he had been sent by the chief of Iraq's Intelligence Service. The Iraqi message was that Baghdad no longer had any unconventional weapons and that it was willing to let American troops and experts conduct a search to prove this. The envoy also conveyed an offer to turn over a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and relayed an Iraqi pledge to hold elections.
.
By March, Washington's military and political preparations for war were complete. The Bush administration was then showing little patience for diplomacy or anything else that might delay what it envisioned as a swift and easy military triumph, with jubilant Iraqis cheering American troops, a model Middle Eastern democracy rising in Baghdad, reconstruction paid for by Iraqi oil revenue and no lengthy military occupation.
.
Iraq has not worked out as planned in the last seven months. As President George W. Bush frankly acknowledged Thursday, a democratic outcome is still far from assured. Yet even without resorting to hindsight, the Bush administration can be faulted for not making more of an effort to determine whether a satisfactory resolution of the weapons issue might have been achieved without war. Put differently, Washington should have put to the test its own words about using the threat of force to coerce concessions.
.
With crucial details unexplored, there is no way of knowing whether war could or should have been avoided, or indeed whether the offer was genuine or what kind of inspections would have been allowed. Any last-minute offer might have been unacceptable, particularly if it meant leaving Saddam's Baathist torturers in power. Yet surely Washington should have made the effort to learn more.
.
Administration supporters were fond of saying at the time that there were things Bush officials knew but could not share with the public. Little did we imagine that among those things was an offer that might have provided a way to avoid the war. To appreciate the significance of James Risen's article in Thursday's New York Times (IHT, Nov. 7) about an 11th-hour Iraqi peace offer last March, it helps to think back to that period. For months the Bush administration had been arguing that the only hope of disarming Baghdad was to steadily ratchet up the threat of an imminent American invasion. Only at that point, Washington asserted, might Saddam Hussein yield to the demands of repeated UN Security Council disarmament resolutions.
.
The article shows that such reasoning may well have been sound. With American forces massed and ready to invade, the Iraqis suddenly expressed interest in meeting their obligations. Yet the article also shows that the administration seems not to have been serious about the idea of a coerced but peaceful solution at the very moment it may have been a realistic possibility.
.
The offer described in the article was conveyed to the Pentagon by a Lebanese-American businessman who said he had been sent by the chief of Iraq's Intelligence Service. The Iraqi message was that Baghdad no longer had any unconventional weapons and that it was willing to let American troops and experts conduct a search to prove this. The envoy also conveyed an offer to turn over a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and relayed an Iraqi pledge to hold elections.
.
By March, Washington's military and political preparations for war were complete. The Bush administration was then showing little patience for diplomacy or anything else that might delay what it envisioned as a swift and easy military triumph, with jubilant Iraqis cheering American troops, a model Middle Eastern democracy rising in Baghdad, reconstruction paid for by Iraqi oil revenue and no lengthy military occupation.
.
Iraq has not worked out as planned in the last seven months. As President George W. Bush frankly acknowledged Thursday, a democratic outcome is still far from assured. Yet even without resorting to hindsight, the Bush administration can be faulted for not making more of an effort to determine whether a satisfactory resolution of the weapons issue might have been achieved without war. Put differently, Washington should have put to the test its own words about using the threat of force to coerce concessions.
.
With crucial details unexplored, there is no way of knowing whether war could or should have been avoided, or indeed whether the offer was genuine or what kind of inspections would have been allowed. Any last-minute offer might have been unacceptable, particularly if it meant leaving Saddam's Baathist torturers in power. Yet surely Washington should have made the effort to learn more.
.
Administration supporters were fond of saying at the time that there were things Bush officials knew but could not share with the public. Little did we imagine that among those things was an offer that might have provided a way to avoid the war. To appreciate the significance of James Risen's article in Thursday's New York Times (IHT, Nov. 7) about an 11th-hour Iraqi peace offer last March, it helps to think back to that period. For months the Bush administration had been arguing that the only hope of disarming Baghdad was to steadily ratchet up the threat of an imminent American invasion. Only at that point, Washington asserted, might Saddam Hussein yield to the demands of repeated UN Security Council disarmament resolutions.
.
The article shows that such reasoning may well have been sound. With American forces massed and ready to invade, the Iraqis suddenly expressed interest in meeting their obligations. Yet the article also shows that the administration seems not to have been serious about the idea of a coerced but peaceful solution at the very moment it may have been a realistic possibility.
.
The offer described in the article was conveyed to the Pentagon by a Lebanese-American businessman who said he had been sent by the chief of Iraq's Intelligence Service. The Iraqi message was that Baghdad no longer had any unconventional weapons and that it was willing to let American troops and experts conduct a search to prove this. The envoy also conveyed an offer to turn over a suspect in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and relayed an Iraqi pledge to hold elections.

Home > International
?'Saddam tried to placate Bush'
JAMES RISEN


WASHINGTON, NOVEMBER 6: As US soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had WMDs, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. They also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the 1993 WTC bombing. At one point, the intermediary said in an interview, the Iraqis pledged to hold elections.

The messages from Baghdad, first relayed by the intermediary in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy and Planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to people involved in the discussion.

The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of Saddam. The overtures, after a decade of evasions and deceptions and a number of other attempts to broker last-minute meetings with US officials, were ultimately rebuffed. But the messages from Baghdad raised enough interest that in early March, Richard Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage. According to both men, Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Perle or another representative of the US.

?'?'I was dubious that this would work,'' Perle said, ?'?'but I agreed to talk to people in Washington.'' Perle said he sought authorisation from CIA officials. Perle said that the CIA officials said they did not want to pursue this channel and indicated they had already engaged in separate contacts with Baghdad. Perle said the response was simple: ?'?'The message was, ?'Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad'.''

A senior US intelligence official said this was one of several contacts with the Iraqis or with people who said they were trying to broker meetings on their behalf before the war.

BREAKING NEWS
This story is from our news.com.au network Source: AFP
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Iraq-US secretly tried to avert war
From correspondents in Washington
November 06, 2003

IRAQIS and Americans secretly tried last February to avoid war in Iraq through negotiations mediated by a Lebanese businessman, US media reported overnight.

ABC News reported the secret meeting involved a Lebanese-American businessman and Iraqi intelligence officials and came just days after Secretary of State Colin Powell laid out the US case for war at the United Nations in February.

Imad Hage, the president of the American Underwriters Group insurance company and known in the region as having contacts at the Pentagon, told the US television network that he was first approached by an Iraqi intelligence official who arrived unannounced at his office in Beirut.

A week later, according to Hage, he and an associate were asked to come to Baghdad, when Hage says he met with Saddam Hussein's chief of intelligence, General Tahir Habbush, who is still of the US military's most wanted list.

:Based on my meeting with his man," said Hage, "I think an effort was there to avert war. They were prepared to meet with high-ranking US officials."






Hage said Habbush repeated public denials by the regime that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and offered to allow several thousand US agents or scientists to carry out inspections, according to ABC News.

Hage said Habbush also offered UN-supervised free elections, oil concessions to US companies and was prepared to turn over a top al-Qaeda terrorist, Abdul Rahman Yasin, who Habbush said had been in Iraqi custody since 1994.

According to Newsweek magazine, the initiative never went anywhere in part because Hage was detained at Washington's Dulles International Airport on suspicions that he was trying to smuggle weapons out of the country.

US Customs inspectors discovered an undeclared semiautomatic .45 calibre pistol and four stun guns in his luggage, the weekly said. They also found he was carrying the business card of Pentagon official Jaymie Durnan.

Although he was questioned by FBI agents, Hage was allowed to board a plane home to Lebanon because he was carrying a Liberian diplomatic passport.

Pentagon adviser Richard Perle told the magazine that he had several meetings with Hage last year "on a variety of issues" but added that he did not take the Iraqi peace overture "very seriously".

I've tried to apply the same respect to Timber's posts, Blatham, but I'm afraid it no longer works.

Nation





Posted on Thu, Nov. 06, 2003
Jessica Lynch says Pentagon used her for propaganda
BY CORKY SIEMASZKO
New York Daily News

(KRT) - Jessica Lynch has angrily accused the Pentagon of using her for propaganda.

The 20-year-old private, portrayed as a female Rambo after she was captured by Iraqis during a blazing gun battle and then freed by American troops, told ABC there was no reason for her rescue from an Iraqi hospital to be filmed.

"They used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff," Lynch said in an interview with Diane Sawyer that airs Tuesday, Veterans Day.

"Yeah, it's wrong," Lynch said. "I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things" they said.

That footage of U.S. commandos wheeling a grimacing Lynch to a waiting chopper was among the most dramatic of the war - and helped cement her image as a female warrior.

But Lynch said the true heroes were the soldiers who saved her.

"They're the ones that came in to rescue me," she said. "I'm so thankful that they did what they did; they risked their lives. … They are my heroes."

She also disputed the Pentagon's early version of her capture by Iraqis, which suggested she had heroically defended herself - going down only after firing all her ammo.

Lynch says her M-16 jammed and she never got off a shot.

"My weapon did jam and I did not shoot, not a round, nothing," she said simply.

There was no immediate response from the Pentagon, which awarded Lynch a Purple Heart for her injuries.

ABC released excerpts of Lynch's first television interview yesterday after the Daily News obtained a copy of Lynch's authorized biography and revealed its most shocking secret - that she was raped by her Iraqi captors.

She has no memory of the rape. The book says there was a three-hour gap after her capture, a blank in her mind, during which she was assaulted.

"Even just the thinking about that, that's too painful," she told Sawyer.

Lynch said she was awakened from her stupor by searing pain.

"I seriously thought I was going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life," she told ABC.

The young soldier said at first she did not trust her Iraqi doctors - and tried to stifle her screams.

Trapped in her bed, Lynch said, she tried to tame her terror by thinking about her family, her fiance, Sgt. Ruben Contreras, and her G.I. buddy Lori Piestewa.

After she was rescued, she learned Piestewa was dead.

In her book, "I Am a Soldier, Too," author Rick Bragg says the scars on Lynch's body and medical records indicate she was anally raped, and he tells the reader to "fill in the blanks of what Jessi lived through on the morning of March 23, 2003."

Lynch says her unit was sent into battle armed only with M-16s - no grenades or anti-tank weapons - and in lumbering trucks that could not keep up with the convoy barreling toward Baghdad.

When the trucks in her unit tried to catch up, radio contact with the main convoy was lost - and so were they.

She was filled with foreboding.

"Jessi's fear of being left behind was beginning to come true," Bragg wrote.

---

© 2003, New York Daily News.

Visit the Daily News online at http://www.nydailynews.com

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

THE MESSOPOTAMIAN
TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD

Friday, November 07, 2003
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم (In the Name of God the Most Mercifull)

Hi everybody,

We the Iraqis, find ourselves in the midst of a great turning point in human history. This is no dramatisation, no exaggeration. But if you make even a cursory perusal of the 6000 years or so history of Messopotamia, you will find that this, strangely, is the fate of this particular spot on the earth. Let us not get bogged in the confusing and painful details at this particular time and look at the essence of the matter.

Jolted and shocked by the events of September 11, the United States of America, the greatest and most powerful politico-economic power that humanity has ever known has realised that the advanced and rich western world can no longer ignore the plight of the poorer and underdeveloped world. Those "nation states", who have totally failed the test of self determination and self goverment, and degenerated into obscurantism, sectarianism, tribalism, and all the other isms of hell, pose a mortal danger, both to the people unfortunate to live there and to the Western civilisation itself. More so since the technical complexity of the advanced world render it particularly vulnerable. The danger is real, oh so real! Anybody doubting this is living in a fools paradise.

So Action was decided upon. Action to change the situation in this twilight zone ( c.f. George Orwel - 1984 ), action to bring the values and standards enjoyed by the prosperous world to these places, by force if necessary, by example preferably. And action was taken. this in a nutshell. Let who may tear their hair off. Let them protest until their lungs puncture and shout until their throats bleed. This is it. It is like all great movements in history, characterised by singlemindedness and overpowering impulse. The old style of european imperialism, which aimed at exploitation, cheap raw materials, and keeping people backward and in a state of peasant low existance, has gone and is no longer suitable for the world. A globalised world where every body can enjoy the freedoms and benefits taken for granted by the "advanced" world. This is liberal neo-imperialism. Is it eutopean, is it unrealisable ? I don't know the answer. But the campaign is already under way.

Years ago, in my earlier youth, had I heard somebody talking like this, my hair would have stood on end, I would have been thrown into a fit of rage enough to give me heart attack. But years of suffering, years ground to dust and wasted living under a system which had hardly anything right in it, atavism which took us back to a moral state comparable to that that existed even before the reforms of Islam fifteen centuries ago, have finally brought me to this forlorn conclusion: that perhaps it is better this way - perhaps that really, salvation lies herein.

Caution to the wind. Consider this: if the U.S. tommorrow announces that anybody willing to come to its land would be given the "Green Card" immediately with no further question, how many people do you think would stand in line? Answer this question if you dare ? Why if Western values are so bad and so terrible would you find Muslim, Hindu, Buddist, and every colour and every breed standing in that hypothetical line, in their billions ?

But America cannot take in the entire humanity, so america decides to go to them instead.

Fool, romantic, freak, say what you may. Romantics have always shaped history.

Caution to the wind, caution to the wind.

"Thus Spake the Ordinary Man" - Long Live the Blogging Revolution.

Salam Alaykum




# posted by Alaa : 2:12 PM