Final Offer
Why Iraq's last-minute peace overture was a sham.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, Nov. 10, 2003, at 12:15 PM PT
I.F. Stone used to say that the New York Times and the Washington Post were great newspapers because you never knew on what page you would find the front-page story. I find this rule to be highly variant in the case of the New York Times, which frequently puts great stuff on its front page but which often prints it upside down. This was especially so with last Thursday's headline: "Iraq Said to Have Tried to Reach Last-Minute Deal to Avoid War." The subhead was "Wary CIA Rebuffed Back-Channel Proposal."
If the Times wanted to give the impression that an 11th-hour chance for peace had been missed or rejected (an impression greatly reinforced by the selection of letters it has since chosen to print on the subject), then the headline was the overture to that interpretation. But James Risen's well-written and absorbing article actually sustains and fortifies the precisely opposite analysis. If his reportage is basically correct—and there is no reason to doubt it in essentials—then we must believe that some senior members of the Iraqi secret police, operating through a Lebanese businessman as intermediary, made urgent approaches to senior American policy hawks in February and March of this year. To avert an invasion, they were prepared to offer (and to offer in their dreaded leader's name) the following concessions:
1) proof that Iraq no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, this proof to be confirmed by American military and civilian experts invited to see for themselves on the ground
2) the handing over of Abdul Rahman Yasin, indicted in the United States for his part in the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 and since that date a protected refugee in Iraq
3) support for an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement as sponsored by Washington
4) the granting to the United States of "first priority" with respect to the exploitation of Iraqi oil and mineral rights
5) elections in Iraq as soon as two years hence.
What a bargain! But those who complain that it was turned down by a war-hungry Bush administration have (yet again) shown themselves to have a mainly if not exclusively nincompoopish mentality. Observe the following obvious points:
1) The Iraqi approaches were specifically directed toward the world of Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and Douglas Feith, all of them highly identified with the "regime change" policy. These approaches were also undertaken at a time when American and British forces had already commenced a serious deployment in Kuwait, Qatar, and elsewhere. This is clearly a tribute to the only force that was acting as a trigger or catalyst for change: the group that had decided that further coexistence with Saddam Hussein was at once ignoble and impossible. It wasn't a case of contacting the Carter Center in Atlanta and trying to buy some spurious time.
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