Saddam offered to go into exile 1 month before Iraq war

[Kat Kanning]

Saddam Offered Exile, But Neo-Cons Unleashed Carnage Anyway
What could have been saved? A trillion dollars, a million lives, the global reputation of the U.S. - but that wasn't the plan

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet
Thursday, September 27, 2007      


Neo-Cons could have saved a trillion dollars, spared over a million lives and prevented tens of thousands of dead and injured U.S. soldiers but decided to unleash carnage anyway, after it was revealed last night that Saddam Hussein offered to step down and go into exile one month before the invasion of Iraq.

"Fearing defeat, Saddam was prepared to go peacefully in return for £500million ($1billion)," reports the Daily Mail.

"The extraordinary offer was revealed yesterday in a transcript of talks in February 2003 between George Bush and the then Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar at the President's Texas ranch."
"The White House refused to comment on the report last night. But, if verified, it is certain to raise questions in Washington and London over whether the costly four-year war could have been averted."

According to the tapes, Bush told Aznar that whether Saddam was still in Iraq or not, "We'll be in Baghdad by the end of March."



Why didn't the Neo-Cons take Saddam's offer? After all, the invasion was about "weapons of mass destruction" and "spreading freedom", we were told. With the dictator gone, the U.N. and American forces were free to roam the country in search of the non-existent weapons while setting up the "utopian democracy" that Iraqis now live under.

The Neo-Cons didn't take the offer because the invasion of Iraq was not about Saddam Hussein, it was about making fat profits for the military-industrial complex by bombing the country back into the stone age, slaughtering countless innocents in the process, seizing control of oil factories, and setting up military bases as a means of launching the Empire's next jaunt into Iran.

The invasion of Iraq was about having a justification to stay there indefinitely and break the country up into different pieces as was the plan all along.


Here's what $1 billion could have saved us.

- At least $200 million every single day that could have been spent on fighting poverty, building schools, taking men to Mars, ad infinitum.

- At least $1 trillion that the Iraq war will eventually cost if we ever leave. A trillion is a million millions.

- At least 1 million dead Iraqis according to the latest numbers, along with millions more that will die in the years to come as a result of depleted uranium poisoning, malnutrition, cholera and all manner of other horrors brought about by the invasion.

- Over 1.1 million displaced Iraqis who have been forced to leave their new "utopian democracy" and another million who have been forced to leave their homes due to sectarian violence and persecution.

- Over 3800 dead U.S. soldiers since the invasion began.

- 300 dead coalition soldiers since the invasion began.

- Anything from 23,000 to 100,000 injured U.S. soldiers since the invasion began.

- The reputation of the U.S. around the world as the most hated nation on earth.

- The ballooning deficit and the probable eventual collapse of the U.S. dollar and the economy.

Thanks Neo-Cons - I hope it was worth it.

[mvpel]

You'd have to persuade me that letting a mass-murdering genocidal dictator with the blood of countless innocents on his hands from a thirty-year reign of terror skate off to live out his days in luxury, never to be held to account for his crimes, while the nation he shattered struggled to rebuild would have resulted in LESS carnage, LESS violence, and LESS strife than what we're seeing now.

[brandon dean]

You'd have to persuade me that letting a mass-murdering genocidal dictator with the blood of countless innocents on his hands from a thirty-year reign of terror skate off to live out his days in luxury, never to be held to account for his crimes, while the nation he shattered struggled to rebuild would have resulted in LESS carnage, LESS violence, and LESS strife than what we're seeing now.

good point, not to mention what good the billion dollars would have done for the actual people of iraq who aren't already rich like saddam.  and not to mention the ten years of sanctions and starving children the US imposed while saddam lounged in mansions eating fine food and pretending to be king nebukadnezar... I suppose one cannot prove things in iraq would have been better than they are now if we had stayed home, but you can prove the dead americans would still be alive, or at least not dead from war wounds in iraq...

[mvpel]

The government of Iraq starved the Iraqi children, not the sanctions.

[brandon dean]

I believe both the iraqi government and the sanctions are responsible for the starving and diseased children, not to mention the air embargo and years of exposure to radiation from depleted uranium bombs dropped during the first gulf war, which american soldiers are suffering from also...

[Sheep Fuzzy Wool]

Where are the WMD's?

[EthanAllen]

RD,

You are growing on me...

[mvpel]

"There were no WMDs" - then how do you explain US troops injured by sarin gas from an in-flight mixing sarin warhead rigged as an IED?  Or the 500 other WMD finds in Iraq:

Reading from a declassified portion of a report by the National Ground Intelligence Center, a Defense Department intelligence unit, Santorum said: "Since 2003, coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent. Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq's pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist."

• Click here to read the declassified portion of the NGIC report.

As for the "million dead" number or whatever it is - you do realize that they had a 95% confidence interval for that, right?  The Iraq Body Count website has documented about 74,000 to 81,000 civilian deaths from violence from the beginning of the invasion.  The ILCS came up with something in the same general ballpark.  In order for there to have been a million dead there would have to be an average of 500 deaths every single day, and hundreds of thousands of death certificates that were never officially recorded.

If you're going to get all huffy, you should at least base your indignation on reality, not some trumped-up fantasy of the BDS sufferers.

Maybe the reason the "million" number keeps getting thrown around is because Saddam's government killed around 300,000 dissidents and perhaps three quarters of a million Iranians, and in the minds of BDS sufferers, Bush has to be worse than Saddam.

[CNHT]

They just had to feed the war machine.

That treasonous son of a bitch and all of his fucking cronies should be tried as terrorists.

He was tried - and executed....

[brandon dean]

numerous bush administration officials caught on video lying about iraq, and a bunch of people heckling them:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAH3AeFy0SY

[mvpel]

Capt. Coo Coo Bananas has been leaning pretty fascist lately, don't you think?? What if other countries, out of pure (earned) hatred and spite for us, decided it was time to take Prez. Dingleshit out for his crimes against humanity in other countries?? Huh?? What if they bombed us mercilessly and then invaded our land and shot at anyone who had the fucking dignity to protect their land and family?? You'd be singing a different tune, that's what. Don't tell me we have any business trapsing around the world, killing hundreds of thousands of people and claiming "liberation". Jesus.

Your mistake seems to be confusing the stubborn remnants of the regime which was responsible for cutting off tongues and limbs, flogging soles of feet, breaking bones, branding, throwing dissidents off rooftops, and using nerve and mustard gas on civilian populations with people "having the fucking dignity to protect their land and family."

Who was to protect this man's dignity as his forearm was officially shattered for the offense of dissent against the government?


I think that the principal thing that any Iraqi opposing US troops is fighting to protect is their own ability to brutalize and terrorize other Iraqis into submission, to be the one swinging the stout stick onto someone else's forearm.

[EthanAllen]

I think that the principal thing that any Iraqi opposing US troops is fighting to protect is their own ability to brutalize and terrorize other Iraqis into submission, to be the one swinging the stout stick onto someone else's forearm

Saddam was "our" guy used as a foil to the Iranians after their revolution in '79.

[CNHT]

Who was to protect this man's dignity as his forearm was officially shattered for the offense of dissent against the government?

Saddam was the master of torture. Iraq was never free.

It is not necessary to be an apologist for a monster like Saddam, just to be against aggressive war. It is OK to be against both.
It's not an either or thing.

Saddam was a madman and many people suffered under his regime, the likes of which we've never seen in this country.

[mvpel]

So doesn't that make it even more incumbent upon the US to take him out and put an end to his reign of terror which our nation callously treated as blood-spattered background noise to the proxy war being waged against the Soviet Union?

If it's about being against aggressive war, why were so many among the anti-war crowd content to let Iraq's invasion and overthrow of a neighboring sovereign nation stand?

[Sheep Fuzzy Wool]

http://whatreallyhappened.com/