Saddam wanted into exile, but Bush rather wanted his head

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So Saddam offered his exile to prevent the invasion of Iraq. Remarkable enough that this item was forgotten in the news for some four years. It is ... a whatever. I remember I brought that up as a good idea at the time, and it was not acceptable at the time. Not to mention that Saddam said it, what meant it couldn't possibly have been serious - clearly he must have been lying. Wasn't he always?

So the US could have had Iraq, without the additional destruction the invasion brought over the place, with an intact albeit (horrors!) Baathist state - complete with an intact army, police and administration - and with the option to pick one convenient ruler (say, Allawi) of their liking for the price of Saddam's exile and one billion pocket money. But it wasn't good enough. Not transformative and radical enough.

I ask myself if obstinacy disguised as 'principles', and the satisfaction to see Saddam hanged in perhaps the most degrading way conceivable short of being hanged by a mob on the street was worth all the lives, limbs and billions spent. Udai and Qudai killed! Yay! Ask Bush today and he will say that he sleeps well and sound in the knowledge to have done 'the right thing'. Clearly, it was Saddam stubbornness (not to mention the imagined unimaginable peril every atom of his regime posed to the rest of the world) that brought the invasion over Iraq, wasn't it?

Iran's exceptional offer of a grand bargain wasn't good enough because the Bush administration was still high on their initial easy victories in Afghanistan and was looking at Iran as item #4 on their regime change to-do list. Regime change was merely a tool to achieve that mystical 'transformation' of the Greater Middle East the administration is still blathering about. Well, much like the Afghans the Iraqis have shown a remarkable degree of resistance to these ambitious social engineering efforts.

But as I remember reading here in 2003 in a particularly testosterone fueled post, 'somebody's gotta do the job' - after all evildoers must be punished, and the rest of the world is just too coward to drag them muslimiacs kicking and screaming out of the stone age! What I see here is a stubborn persistence not to accept a capitulation because surrender just isn't good enough. It has to be unconditional, an utter defeat and then humiliation and physical destruction. Part of that certainly is a result of wanting to get even after 911, and for angry red-blooded Americans Afghanistan clearly wasn't big enough a bloodbath to quench the thirst the twin towers attack awakened. It had to be more. It is good to see that part of that enthusiasm has disappeared. But then, Iran is being built up as another very perilous threat to the rest of the world. Beware!

Today the Bush administration is still smoking in the powder magazine that is the Middle East, for the sake of not yielding to designated evildoers (Hezbollah, Syria, Iran etc. pp.). If they are not very careful they are going to ignite a fire with the potential to devour millions. I have the highest confidence in the ineptness and ham handedness of the sitting administration as far as this is concerned. Such irrationality. No: Moral clarity! Scary. The only thing scarier that comes to my mind is Rudy Giuliani to become president. The guy's a veritable nutter compared to whom Bush looks tame, sane and rational.

[ September 30, 2007, 17:46: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Considering that 15 of the 19 terrorists who took part in the 9/11 attacks were Saudi, the fact that Bush invaded Afghanistan but not Saudi Arabia is questionable enough.

Its business, simple as that.

 

I suspect that the American administration's backed public lynching of Saddam was a gift to his old political, and even military, enemies. But that's not to say that GWB and some segments of the American population (like FOX TV and its viewers) didn't get their rocks off at the rather macabre spectacle. Speaking of "moral clarity," executions and a war of conquest have been GWB's political trademark. You know, the "pro-life" guy?

 

But Pro Life only applies to the unborn. Saddam was branded a criminal, and had to stand trial. They wanted Hussein to be tried for his crimes (questioning how fair that trial would be is beside the point). Some how letting the guy off to a tropical paradise with a billion dollars wouldn't cut it...

 

That's really not the point, Gnarff, because Ragusa's larger point was that thousands of innocent lives could have been spared, and the country would not have gone through the horror of war had there been a peaceful change of power.

And I'm really not sure about your point that the notion of life being sacred only applies to the unborn. In fact, that seems a little incredulous. When the "culture of life" is spoken of, it is not only the lives of which we approve but of all life, especially those that are already a reality.

 

It was iirc General Ridgeway who said it in the Korean war:

That IMO also applies to Iraqi civilians, even though Ridgeway didn't say that. And he clearly represents old think, dignity is only for the 'good guys' nowadays. I despise now as then the ghoulish delight in celebrating presumable 'bad guys' deads, and considering the toll this war thus far has taken from the Iraqis ... where are we now?

Some 650.000+ Iraqi dead through four years of carnage, numbers from a year ago, add some 2 million refugees (on a population of roughly 25 million, that's approx 8% living out of country now). To get the idea, and I hope I get my math right that early, imagine America having some 50 million or so going to Canada, and only the well educated best and brightest who can afford to flee (and while at it, just for a moment consider the brain drain for a nation), and have some 10 million dead - and many more surviving casualties. Just to get the idea what devastation the war has brought over Iraq. For what?

Because evildoers must not be appeased! Or because it was too much fun to masturbate on that Iraqi deck of cards? Oh no! How could I forget, they were sacrificed on the altar of Democratic transformation of the Middle East! Indeed, the dung heap of political theory, no, the tree of liberty, nothing less, must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants!

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I guess Georgie Porgie liked that eye for an eye part too much to continue reading Ye Olde Book. Or he shortcut that by directly asking Him wether invading Iraq is a great idea. Hell knows who's answering George when he's alone in the dark.

[ October 01, 2007, 08:36: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Would that be $ 1 billion from Iraq's money, or did he want that money to leave the country? I still think it would be cheaper and safer for everyone involved anyway, but wanting that money from the US when it is gearing to invade shows more than a little nerve.

 

I'm assuming the $1 billion would be the total bill for everything. Getting your own choice of who will be the leader of a foreign nation doesn't come for free you know. And considering we are currently spending over $1 billion per week - $1 billion for the whole job seems like a bargain! And I still can't get over the $1 billion per week. Divide by seven and then divide by 24, and you come up with nearly $6 million dollars per hour that we're over there. Disgusting.

Of course it must apply to all life and not just the unborn. A life in existence must count at least as much as a life in potentia.

 

Iirc the offer included the entire family leaving, not only Saddam but sons and close family as well. Saddam most certainly was acutely aware this was about regime change. The guy wasn't daft, else he wouldn't have survived for so long.
And that he wasn't daft is illustrated by the fact that the US military in Iraq today basically revert to Saddam's old tribal strategies, with all the risks involved with that. It is entirely possible that ol' Saddam's leadership style is the only one effective in holding Iraq together. Speak about 'herding cats'.

And please do not try to tell me the US did not have a choice in invading. That was a war of choice if there ever was one.

The reports on the conversation between Bush and Aznar remind me of why I eventually turned against the US on Iraq - because I recognised that the Bush crew wanted war and wouldn't be happy with anything less - and that the show about evidence, UN resolutions, international law, imminent threats and such were all about creating a pretext to generate sufficient public support at home to be able to pull it off.

 

I can tell you a couple of things:

• Iraq would still have a military consisting of Shia and Sunni, able to impose order, and still pose a counterweight to Iran.
• There wouldn't have been 500k laid off guys with guns in a position and with a strong motive to start an insurgency.
• Iraq would still have an intact government apparatus with ministeries. They would not have been destroyed by looting. Iraq would still have those experienced administrators that made Iraq the second best developed country in the Middle East, after Israel. Yes, they'd be from the Baath party, but so what, that isn't exactly a US problem. These folks know the place, language and people and are absolutely capable of what the US have unable to do - rebuilding Iraq after the decade of sanctions. After all they watched about the power plants and sewage facilities being built and tightly supervised the foreign construction companies.
• Probably Iraq today would have electricity for 20-24 hours a day, at least be at pre-war levels in that regard.

All these things happened as a result of the US invasion and subsequent US management, or rather attempts thereof.

The US invasion is the conditio sine qua non for all that. You cannot think it away.

 

I do not say it would be rosy picture, or that the US would have liked the alternative, the Bush administration clearly expressed that they didn't, but that's not the point anyway.

Presumably many people that are dead wouldn't be, had the US not invaded. Maybe they would have all died of heart attacks anyway. Maybe. Who knows. What is certain is that the US invasion triggered a series of disastrous consequences. Equally certain is that the US chose to invade. The more I think about it, nobody forced it on the US. If anyone forced the US hand, US domestic dynamics, certainly not Iraq.

To blame Saddam seems to me overly convenient and rather self serving. And now that Iraq is FUBAR-ed, it's them Iraqis that couldn't responsibly handle all the freedom the US handed to them. And, of course, because of all the Iranian meddling. Anybody's fault but the US'. What about those guys that got suckered by everyone, by the Kurds, by Chalabi, by the Shia and the Sunni - the US? Oh, they just happen to be there and, inexplicably, people, for inexplicable reasons, shoot at them. Don't exactly know why. Iirc they arrived as tourists. The US wrote and enacted laws that are still binding on the sovereign Iraqi government, it forced the Iraqi hand when they made their attempt of a constitution. And now the Iraqi government, sovereign as they are, is miserably failing to achieve the US imposed milestones <!-- irony alert! -->. So what? I doubt they really care. I have severe doubts that the US is atm even running Iraq, all delusions to the contrary in D.C. non withstanding - like that moronic senate vote on the partitioning of Iraq. The colonial age is over. Maybe that's the simple point.

So Saddam was so rotten that he was unacceptable? Do you know that, or do you prefer to believe that? I feel that view has more to do with US domestic perception than anything else.

How much better is it now? Of course, of course, the Iraqis are better off today than under Saddam. Tell that the two million of them living in Jordan and Syria now. Probably they're there for the sightseeing. What about Kurdish and Shia ethnic cleansing? What about the exodus of religious minorities that were safe under Saddam? Are Shia torture dungeons any different or better than Saddam's? What about Shia death squads? Is the US today not being allied with ruthless thugs and murderers, again one is tempted to say? It seems that in Iraq, they don't really have a choice.

Amazingly enough the US could suddenly work with the super villain of the 1980s, Libya, without having to kill either Ghaddafi or his son first. But I guess the reason why is because of Libya's geographical location. My take is that Libya simply wasn't picked as a stop on the 'Durchmarsch' from Kuwait City to Beirut. Libya, located in North Africa, didn't need to be conquered because it wasn't part of the glorious transformation of the Middle East. It had no relevance for that plan.

One point I take comfort in is that, despite all unitary executive and global hegemonic grandeur, the Buhies still found it necessary to create an excuse to go to war and didn't simply start invading. It underlines that nobody can completely reign without the consent of the locals. That bears hope for the US. In a sense, that certainly did apply to Saddam as well. No regime can rest on terror alone. Saddam understood how to reward and punish and how to balance rivals - which is what the US is right now trying to replicate. That is, his reign was in part at the very least, consensual. I fear the only things that go in Iraq are either tyranny or anarchy.

 

Of course, had Saddam been exiled it MIGHT have saved lives. But that assumes that he would have acted in good faith. That is something I highly doubt.

That said, the invasion/occupation was very stupid. I figure they should have just gone in, obliterated any military capability the country, and left. That would have probably saved lives, but as has been mentioned before, we don't know that for certain.

 

As I said, do you know that, or do you prefer to believe that?

Besides, 'just going in and obliterating any military capability' is an invasion, too.

EDIT: Semantics aside, it would also have had the effect of removing the counterweight to Iran and strengthened the Iranian position. From what those Iran hawks blather now, a strong Iran is just unacceptable. Old Bush and Old Cheney (before he turned whacky) were both right: Leaving Saddam in power served a purpose, and served US interests.

So destroying that counterweight, and then not occupying the country too, would perhaps have been even stupider. If you invade, you got to go all the way. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

[ October 01, 2007, 22:12: Message edited by: Ragusa ]

 

Or, alternatively, where Gore won Florida.

Just sayin'.

 

If the insinuation about "prefer to believe that" is that I'm a fool for not trusting Saddam, then I'll glady wear the name of fool. As I said, the invasion against his regime was foolish in retrospect, but any attempt to make him a choirboy or martyr or anything other than the vicious dictatorial thug that he was is laughable. He'd proved frequently that he was despicable and totally untrustworthy.

In any event, if the U.S. HAD let him go, people'd be criticizing them for making deals with despots.

As for invasions and then going all the way, the fact is that as long as the U.S. follows (or attempts to follow on an official level) civilized codes of conduct (and the fact that Abu Gahraib and the similar incidents generate appropriate reactions in the U.S. populace proves that the U.S. still has a conscience) then they will not be able to effect change in Iraq. I used to believe they could, but it appears that all those people understand is brutal, vicious, merciless force. The U.S. should back out and let them duke it out. They've removed the ability of the country to seriously threaten its neighbours, and it is no longer a threat to U.S. interests in the area. Either that or the U.S. should take the gloves off and pound them to bits, but doing that would make them little better than Nazis, and I don't think that's where even the most vicious of right-wing ideologues wants to go.