Saddam offered to hold elections to avoid war with US

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/world/archives/2003/11/08/2003075077

<snip>
As US and British troops massed in the Gulf, Iraqi intelligence sent out a range of compromise feelers through a number of channels in the apparent hope of forestalling the invasion or at least buying time.

The messages were sent through Syrian intelligence, and French, German and Russian diplomatic channels, and as the countdown to invasion ticked away, through retired CIA officials and a Lebanese-American businessman who met the Washington hawk, Richard Perle, in a London hotel.

The first approach appears to have been made last December through the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro.

"I was approached by someone representing Tahir al-Tikriti -- the Iraqi intelligence chief also known as Tahir Habbush -- who said Saddam knew there was a campaign to link him to September 11 and prove he had weapons of mass destruction," Cannistraro said. "The Iraqis were prepared to satisfy those concerns. I reported the conversation to senior levels of the state department and I was told to stand aside and they would handle it."

He later heard the Iraqi offer had been "killed" by the Bush administration.
<snip>

All sorts of things are popping up.

[jenk]

1. dubious motives.....

I'd say the motives got more......dubious

this wasn't just a rush to war, this was a sprint, a mad dash.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

3. Saddam was giving everything the UN wanted in the weeks

preceding the war. I remember feeling that Bush was going to attack even it Saddam had himself drawn and quartered on the whitehouse lawn.

[Voltaire99]

8. What Norman Mailer said...

...the chief reason - out of many - for invading Iraq was because we could.

9-11 created an appetite. Afghanistan was an hors d'oeurve. Iraq is the first course.

[TacticalPeek]

9. Actually, the appetite preceded 9/11.

And Afghanistan (which see) was a temporary distraction.

[PartyPooper]

2. Taipei Times

Is that a credible source?

:shrug:

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

4. They listed their sources at the top of the article. I have no reason

to doubt it any more or less than other international papers. Everybody is going to lean a little one way or another.

[mike_c]

5. I think the Taipei Times picked this story up from AP....

There have been several threads about it during the last 24 hours or so, from other outlets.

As though anyone ever actually believed that the Bushistas had ANY intentions rather than war, under any pretext....

[PartyPooper]

6. Thanks Billy_Pilgrim and mike_c for the clarification!

:kick:

[bpilgrim]

7. sounds like he took my advice and tried to pull a meji restoration ;-)

i was saying he should do a ryoma sakamoto on the neo-cons... how many lurkers did we get from iraq before * liberated them from the internet :evilgrin:

the neoCONs are EVIL...

peace

[jpgray]

10. Do these "dealing Saddam" revelations have one purpose?

They've been cropping up a lot lately.

[TacticalPeek]

11. I've lost exact count.

But we are somewhere in the thousand cuts.

:evilgrin:

[Fovea]

12. All sorts of things are popping up.

It is the price you pay for double crossing the CIA.

When it was just the analysts, they could let it slide. They even understood * asking Tenet to take the dive. But Plame was over the top, and if the government does not hold * accountable, be damned sure that the field boyz will.

The CIA fighting for the cause of human liberty. Who'd a thunk it?
Strange days indeed.

[TrueStory]

13. Why would he offer these compromises to CIA when he could make it Public

and this way maybe he could avoid military intervention?

The only logic behind this could be that as a CIA agent he had only connections and discussions with CIA officers...

but I dunno...

[conservdem]

14. Interesting question.