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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (15865)	11/11/2003 9:53:55 AM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 793681

Why Iraqs Final Offer was a Sham Part two 2) The Iraqi side openly conceded that U.N. inspections as then being conducted were a farce and a sham. Hassan al-Obeidi, chief of foreign operations of the Iraqi intelligence service, is at one point reported to have offered to allow "2,000 FBI agents" to enter Iraq and look at anything they wanted. He had clearly got bored with the easy and transparent routine of thwarting Hans Blix. 3) The Iraqi side clearly dropped all pretense that it had not been involved, for a very long time, in helping the forces of international gangsterism and nihilism. And it offered up Abdul Rahman Yasin, after almost a decade of protecting him. 4) The Iraqi side conceded without embarrassment that its violent opposition to a settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute (this opposition taking the admitted form of direct subsidy to suicide murderers) was sheer opportunism and unconnected to any matter of principle. 5) The Iraqi side offered its mismanaged and beggared oil and mineral sectors on a plate to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In whatever order you take these points (the oil offer is especially good, given the widespread belief among our domestic nut bags that this has been a Halliburton war), they show that the core position of we the regime-changers was correct enough to be endorsed by the Baathists themselves. That's not the endorsement that one particularly or especially desired, but it must count for something. Why did it get turned down, and why was it suspect? There was always the hope, in regime-change circles, that a show of force would do the job without a war, and this is the latest proof that it was also the only hope. But the Iraqis always had the option of confessing to the United Nations what they had done with their previously declared arsenal, and they never resorted even to that rather lenient forum in order to do so. This holds true for all their other reported offers of concessions: either too little or too late, and made by way of secret policemen who would have made any list of wanted war-criminals. Of course such riffraff are often the first to realize that the game is up and that the bluff has been called. And their realization was absolutely 100 percent correct. It had been decided that a major and civilized nation should no longer be run by a crime family that was subverting the region, hosting nihilistic jihadists, and hiding past and present evidence of illegal weaponry (see any chapter of the David Kay report). As for the date of elections, that should be for the Iraqi people and not their murderers and torturers to determine. It was long past time to make an end of the Saddam Hussein regime and start afresh: The risks of doing so are far outweighed by the risks and costs of not doing so. There need be no silly nostalgia for a "peace" offer that essentially confirmed the validity of these propositions. Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and author of The Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq. Article URL: slate.msn.com