How Saddam Could Have Stopped the War

[BurtWorm]

An alternative history:

In late February of 2003, the Iraqi news agency announces that Saddam has surrendered himself and his family to the Iraqi people. They are placed under arrest in a secure palace to await a trial for war crimes and treason against Iraq. A provisional government is set up under the leadership of an obscure Iraqi academic with no ties to the Baathist party, and perhaps even a history of imprisonment by Sadaam's regime. The new leader announces a timetable for restructuring Iraqi society and composing a new constitution. Elections for the convention delegates who will write this document are called for September 2003. The government asks the United Nations to help it locate the alleged weapons of mass destruction and to monitor the transition to the new government. In exchange for this sudden transparency, the UN resolves to lift the sanctions.

Back in Washington, PNACers are suddenly twiddling their thumbs wondering what the hell happened to their marvelous little war.

The awful secret is that this radical rescuing of history is a trick by Saddam to save his ass. He has no intention of ever going through with a war crimes trial. He has essentially placed himself in permanent retirement, and the deal he has struck is if the Baathists give the provisional government two years to create a workable alternative to Baathism, then the trial will never take place. Saddam will remain "imprisoned" while a useless commission idly "gathers evidence" for a major trial many, many years down the road.

[patdem]

1. I see bush* does not have a lock on 'lets pretend'...nothing could have

stopped this war...period!

[BurtWorm]

4. I truly believe that this scenario would have stopped the war

because not even the Bushists would have been brazen enough to launch an attack on a country that was, to all appearances, building its own democracy. Now they might have pulled a Reagan and claimed that Iraq would never have done this without pressure from Bush. Or, more likely, they would have made a big fuss about it being a trick--which, of course, it would be. But the wind would have been knocked out of them.

The difference between this scenario and the one that Saddam actually resorted to, which was the back channel list of major concessions that basically amounted to this minus the surrender of Saddam, didn't work because it was known only to the Bushists, so they could easily deny it existed or was serious, and carry on. But if the whole world believed it was witnessing Saddam surrendering power, Bush would have had the regime change argument yanked right out from under him.

[mikehiggins]

2. It might have worked

except for Saddam really disbeleiveing that the US would actually launch an attack, despite repeated statements to that effect from Washington.

This is a common problem with Bush and his administration. People most often CANNOT beleive the Bush League really mean what they are saying because, more often than not, what they are saying seems insane or lunatic. Well, it may be but that doesn't mean the Bush League doesn't fully intend to do it.

I'm not one of those who claim this administration is fascist but I do think you can learn a lot from history, particularly when you consider the eventual fate of those who thought Hitler didn't mean all those things he put in Mein Kampf.

We have a president who beleives God called him to that office. That should be scary enough for anyone.

The other night a guy was interviewed on tv talking about how Bush wants to meet with the parents of dead British soldiers and pray with them. He wants to bring them solace. With a totally incredulous expression on his face, the interviewee ended up by saying Bush gave all indications that he meant exactly what he had said.

This is crazy, yeah, but this is the reality we face going into 2004.

And you wonder why so many of us support Wes Clark.

[democratreformed]

3. As the events leading up to the war unfolded

I became entirely convinced that there was absolutely NOTHING ANYONE could have done to stop it. I admit your scenario sounds good but they would have figured out some way to get around it. There were too determined.

[BurtWorm]

5. There was nothing anyone in the West or non-Arabic part of the world

could do. Saddam was the only one who had the power to stop the war, and the only way to achieve that would have been to throw the Bushists a whopping curve ball like this one.

I agree with the poster who said Saddam apparently didn't believe Bush was really going to go through with it. Which tells you a lot about Saddam's sanity--or his ability to learn from experience.

[Cleita]

6. So there is a rumor that when Saddam saw that the

Americans really were amassing to attack, he made an offer to go into exile like Idi Amin of Uganda, who recently died in exile. Maybe some Arab nation would have offered him, his family and key party members sanctuary. We couldn't allow him to stay in Iraq under any circumstances.

So the United Nations could have gone in, looked for WMD while helping to form a transitional government. Occupational UN troops could have acted as security until a complete transition could have taken place. Not a shot needed to be fired nor a life lost, nor any destruction to the infrastructure effected.

Of course Bush couldn't have exacted his revenge against Saddam if this scenario had taken place. So I suppose I am also talking fantasy.

[Yupster]

10. Redmember Bush gave him 48 hours to leave Iraq before the invasion

and a couple of countries offered to take him in -- including Saudi Arabia if I remember right. I think also Byelorussia for some reason.

[Cleita]

11. If I remember correctly there was a deadline, but

Saddam didn't offer to leave before then but after the deadline. Well, it seems to me that getting him to actually leave even if it was after the deadline could have avoided the mess we have now.

[Aidoneus]

7. Saddam Hussein could've split the atom bare-handed while upside down,

parted the Red Sea, farted the Star Spangled Banner while doing Cheney's taxes and it still would not have prevented anything. Made it slightly more difficult or a bigger PR disaster, maybe, but would not have put off the invasion and occupation.

[BurtWorm]

8. Oil and control of the Gulf were the objectives, Saddam was the excuse

If you remove the excuse, you can't just throw a war. You need another excuse. What would the Bushist excuse have been had Saddam become a prisoner of the Iraqi people?

[eridani]

13. Exactly--nothing would have stopped this war

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=41&ItemID=3450

But there is no need to discuss it, because after stating solemnly that this is the "single question," they went on the next day to announce that it wasn't the goal at all: even if there isn't a pocket knife anywhere in Iraq, the US will invade anyway, because it is committed to "regime change." The next day we hear that there's nothing to that either; thus at the Azores summit, where Bush-Blair issued their ultimatum to the UN, they made it clear that they would invade even if Saddam and his gang left the country.

The murderous sanctions regime of the following years devastated the society, strengthened the tyrant, and compelled the population to rely for survival on his (highly efficient) system for distributing basic goods. The sanctions thus undercut the possibility of the kind of popular revolt that had overthrown an impressive series of other monsters who had been strongly supported by the current incumbents in Washington up to the very end of their bloody rule: Marcos, Duvalier, Ceausescu, Mobutu, Suharto, and a long list of others, some of them easily as tyrannical and barbaric as Saddam. Had it not been for the sanctions, Saddam probably would have gone the same way,

[Yupster]

9. I honestly thought Saddam

would have flown out furing the 48 hour deadline a-ls Battista or Somoza. That way he could have sat in a mansion and organized resistance from somewhere else with the idea that when things turned into a mess he could have returned from exile in triumph.

That's really what I expected him to do.

[Cleita]

12. How do you know he didn't do that?

He is somewhere organizing a resistance after all. It could be in a neighboring country. Maybe he left his doubles behind to throw the Americans off the scent. Anything is possible.

[the_real_38]

14. Are you kidding me?

Saddam knew exactly what he was doing - he pulled his miltary out of Baghdad, and distributed them in the Sunni triangle, hiding munitions all over the place.

He's just settled in for a long, low-intensity war, and it worked - Bush is trying to get his ass out of there as soon as he can.

Hussein may be looked on in the future as a genius (despite the fact that he's a homicidal maniac).