It’s truly amazing, the hubris of this man. If you read the whole article, you’ll see Bush’s talk of averting war were a sham. Now, would Saddam have really walked away for a billion? Who knows. And what would have happened in Iraq if he did? Again, who knows. We’ll never find out.
Revealed: Saddam ‘ready to walk away for $1bn’
A transcript of an eve-of-war conversation between President George Bush and former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has revealed a previously undisclosed initiative to avert war in Iraq by spiriting Saddam Hussein out of the country.
“Yes, it’s possible,” Mr Bush told the Spanish leader. “The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein … He seems to have indicated he would be open to exile if they would let him take one billion dollars and all the information he wants on weapons of mass destruction.”
But Mr Bush seems to shrug off the idea, saying “it’s also possible he could be assassinated”, and he makes made clear that the US would in any case give “no guarantee” for Hussein.
[…]
The conversation, recorded by Spain’s ambassador to the US, Javier Ruperez, and published this week in El Pais, offers a unique insight into Mr Bush’s brusque interaction with one of the few foreign leaders he trusted. Here was a leader already on the march towards war, expressing impatience and anger at those that disagreed with him.Mr Bush does admit that averting war would be “the best solution for us” and “would also save us $50bn,” greatly underestimating the cost to the US treasury of nearly five years of warfare. But he also talks of how he planned to exact revenge on countries, that did not back the US in its drive to war.
As I recall, at the time it was in the news that Saddam had offered to leave Iraq for a safe haven in Libya (I think). I don’t recall anything about taking money with him though.
I also recall that Bush didn’t make much effort to negotiate or discover WMDs through the UN. He seemed hell bent on invading right from the start.
What would have happened if Saddam had gone into exile? Probably some other despot would have filled the void and there would be another dictator in place. Just like what is going to happen after the US allows Iraq to self govern.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this is indeed true. This president doesn’t seem to need much of a reason to invade a country. I’m still puzzled how congress backed this. I suppose those that did are just as guilty.
Unfortunately we are now mired down is this terrible conflict, that has lost many lives and has ruined countless more. Oh, and not to mention that we’ve destabilized that part of the world in the process.
His own father chose not to invade Iraq for this very reason. Too bad Jr. didn’t have the same sort of judement.
It’s kinda like how he has pretended to be the President too.
This war will end up costing a TRILLION tax dollars, 4,000 dead soldiers, 30,000 maimed Americans and 100’s of thousands innocent civilians. Never mind the opportunity cost and our place on the world stage.
Now you have this GOP installed goon, back peddling and lying (again) to shore up his place in history. One can argue Bush was and is a conspiracy to weaken this country. There is no explanation.
AND ALL THE RESEARCH ON WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION! Do you honestly think that would’ve made the world safer? Puhlease. Thinking like this proves you libs can’t be trusted with the national security of this country.
#1. It seemed clear to me that the US diplomacy leading up to the war was very transparently a sham. It has been revealed as such pretty plainly by the Administration’s sudden claim that “Saddam had to go,” which puts the lie to its pre-war position that if Iraq could prove it did not have WMD, there would be no war.
#5. jeepers, you pro-war types do go on. all that ‘RESEARCH ON WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION’ is all out there. cripes, even some nutbag Japanese cultists can make sarin, an anonymous terrorist had already mailed anthrax around the US, and the American buddy Pakistan is STILL sheltering AQ Khan, the world’s most successful nuclear weapons tech salesman. Saddam and his people were pikers, just more noise in an already noisy room.
>>Thinking like this proves you libs can’t be trusted with the
>>national security of this country.
The last six years prove that chimpanzees can’t be trusted with the national security of this country. At least not intellectually challenged ones like we’ve had.
I wouldn’t call this “unique insight”. Bob Woodward’s book “Plan of Attack” said pretty much the same thing. He called up leaders and told them diplomacy has failed if they begged for more UN negotiations, and then asked them whether they were with him or not. Bush sought a second Security Council resolution only as a favor for Tony Blair to save his political career (How’d that work out for ya, Tony?).
I’m sure Bush convinced himself that he didn’t actually want war. Unfortunately he set his bar so high for avoiding war that it would have become “inevitable” no matter what was done in an attempt to solve the problem peacefully. It also didn’t help that his own party was getting on his case for delaying, saying “are you going to invade or aren’t you?”
#6 cripes, even some nutbag Japanese cultists can make sarin, an anonymous terrorist had already mailed anthrax around the US, and the American buddy Pakistan is STILL sheltering AQ Khan, the world’s most successful nuclear weapons tech salesman. Saddam and his people were pikers, just more noise in an already noisy room.
Yeah, that was the beauty of it.
Saddam’s people didn’t actually have to make any WMDs just keep leaking stories about their “research” into making them.
Dubya desperately wanted us to believe Saddam was playing the inspectors for fools, miraculously moving actual WMDs in an elaborate shell-game – staying one-step-ahead of the inspections…
When all Saddam had to do was fake the movements of the fictitious WMDs.
Two birds with one stone: keeps everyone thinking he’s a bad-ass who is not to be F’ed with, while preventing any eventual prosecution for possession of WMD – if his bluff was not an effective deterrent.
#9. and it appears that the target of Saddam’s WMD propaganda was actually Iran. The Iraqis convinced themselves that it was the nerve gas that helped them hold off the Iranian hordes during the war, and that it was vital that the Iranians believe that they still had big stockpiles.
Frankly, letting Hussein escape with a billion dollars is not what I would consider a reasonable option for peace. Now, if the peace option were for Hussein to abdicate and give himself up to a war crimes tribunal without a fight, that would have been a reasonable option.
#9
For what it is worth, Saddam’s generals *did* think they were moving actual WMDs. They all thought they existed and were shocked that they did not.
#5 Thinking like this proves you libs can’t be trusted with the national security of this country.”
This war has nothing to do with being liberal or not. Bush is incompetent, he invaded the wrong country then bungled the war. He was completely ignorant of world affairs, the cost of nation-building and the implications of his actions.
His ignorance & incompetence has cost us in blood and treasure. He has no idea what do to except MOS.
One of the my “favorite” lies of Bush is when he swore to the Germans in May of 2002, “I have no war plans on my desk,” ( http://tinyurl.com/35hqth ) when, as we know now, he — at that very moment — was TOTALLY planning to invade Iraq.
OK. OK. Bushie apologists like to point out that the war plans were technically … they were probably in a drawer or something.
>>Thinking like this proves you libs can’t be trusted with the
>>national security of this country.
Bleck! What shameless history revisionism.
In 1999 the radicals were determined to strike in the USA on the millennium– but the “lib” administration read the memo and acted on it. Americans had a great party.
When Bush received a similar memo about 9/11, if he even bothered to read it he found nothing “actionable” in it and stayed on vacation. Americans suffered horrifically.
>> he found nothing “actionable” in it and stayed on vacation.
The whole world would have been better off if he’d stayed on vacation for eight years, instead of pretending to be president. Hey, that Crawford ranch has an endless supply of brush that needs clearing. The guy should have been keeping up his property, instead of destroying America.
The easiest solution to having got Saddam out of office was simply to assisinate him. Or just drop a huge bomb on his palace when he was there. The mission would have cost no American lives or casualties and collateral damage would have been nil (except for Hussein’s henchmen). It was within the president’s power.
Why wasn’t this done?
An eye for an eye.
Saddam’s head on a platter would have meant George’s head on a platter. Why couldn’t a president give up his life for something he truly believed in? Maybe because fear of his death was too much to bear than 3,000 soldiers who he could send in to do his dirty work?
Give a child a gun, and he’s going to play with it.
We *did* try to drop a big bomb on Saddam multiple times. We had covert ops all over Iraq prior to the invasion trying to find him for that express reason. The micro-second that Saddam realized that we might invade he went deep underground (literally) and we couldn’t get to him.