Questions about those Iraq-US contacts

ABC News broke the story Wed. night, then the NYT had it in more detail today: that the Bushies turned down what looked like a last-ditch, groveling offer from Saddam that would have met most or virtually all of the US’s pre-war demands.
According to both those versions of the story, Saddam was offering to let “2,000 US agents” comb his country for evidence of the WMDs. Plus, the NYT said he had offered to cut cosy deals with the US on access to Iraqi oil and also to hold elections within two years.
So the Bushies turned down the offer. It seems they were determined to fight their war.
(Some important details of the story– those concerning the holding, though not necessarily the content, of the back-channel contacts– were confirmed for both news outlets by Richard Perle, to whom the contacts had been directed.)
Why did Imad Hage, the key Lebanese-American business executive who was the key go-between, suddenly spill the beans to the US media? One clue may come from the fact that Mike Maalouf, a Lebanese-American who was then working in Doug Feith’s office in the Pentagon and who was apparently involved in the contacts along with Hage, has in the interim been “put on administrative leave.”
Maybe these two guys want the folks in the Pentagon to know that they have plenty of information and are not afraid to use it?
But here’s another interesting wrinkle, too. AFP reported today that the Hage’s key Iraqi intermediary, Tahir Jalil al-Habbush al-Takriti, described as Saddam’s intelligence chief, had been suborned by the Americans somewhere along the way. (Maybe through the contacts with Hage? Separately? Who knows?)
According to this AFP story– which my spouse sent me off the ‘net, but I can’t find a URL for it yet– this Habbush was one of four top regime people who were due to meet with Saddam at a restaurant in the Mansouriyeh district of Baghdad on April 9. But Habbush never turned up. Saddam, fearing that Habbush had betrayed him, high-tailed it away from the location– and 15 minutes later the whole place went up in smoke after having that really heavy US bomb dropped on it.
The AFP story is sourced to a “former government official” in Iraq.
The story then quotes three former government officials as saying that Habbush “was evacuated by the US forces as soon as they entered Baghdad, along with other members of the former regime who collaborated with the United States.”
So the small question here is “How long had Habbush actually been on the payroll before April 9?”
But the big question still has to be, Exactly who was it in the Bush administration who put his (or her) foot down on any further exploration of the intriguing negotiation being offered by Hage? Was it Perle himself? Or had he taken it to Rumsfeld or the Prez then one of them turned it down?
Whoever it was made that tragic call is probably– or let’s hope so– having serious regrets right now.
Maybe in light of the scale of the tragedy in Iraq since March, the whole lot of them should just resign.

7 thoughts on “Questions about those Iraq-US contacts”

  3. Alex– Thanks for sending me to that piece by Fawaz. I agree with much of what he says there. However, I think it is ways, ways too early to make this judgment that he voiced about the US occupation administration in Iraq: “it will succeed, after all is said and done, in turning [Iraq] into a society of laws and institutions where citizens, along with high-school kids, are protected against arbitrary arrest, incarceration, torture and execution.”
    It would be so nice to imagine that this could be so!
    My view of military occupations and what they achieve is not totally critical– do a search on the site under “military occupation”, sometime. However, I have a number of linked reservations about the view that Fawaz expresses.
    First, as noted above, it is FAR too soon to say that the US WILL succeed in bringing about a basically decent, rule-of-law-type society. That is far from being the only possible scenario one can foresee right now; and, I would add, it is probably NOT the most probable. (What is one’s time-frame– five years, say?)
    Second, I don’t like any argument that just glides over the very real harm that war–any war– itself inflicts on civilian society. There is tangible, physical harm (deaths due to direct killing and also to huge degradation of infrastructure, etc etc.) There’s also the social/psychological “demonstration effect”, whereby the use of force to resolve differences is normalized; and that has certainly been continuing inside Iraq.
    All those arguments that make a straight analogy between the current US role in Iraq (war + occupation) and the Allied role in WW2 Europe (war + occupation) glide over those important and well-known facts about the harmful nature of war itself. Involvement in the war was MUCH more immediately “justifiable”, that is, less “optional”, for the Allies in WW2 than it was for the Bushies in Iraq, 2003…
    Third, Fawaz hasn’t explained how THIS administration, of THIS geographically and culturally distant country (the US) is going to be the force that almost unilaterally can spearhead this transition to rule-of-law in Iraq. The UN might stand a better chance, and despite its role during 12 years of sanctions has more “support” from the Iraqis to do so than the US does. So if one’s paramount interest in all this is the wellbeing of the Iraqi people–which many people claim, some more credibly than others– then I think a speedy transition to UN administration, with the UN then tasked to oversee rapid Iraqification, is the way to go.
    Still, it is really interesting that Fawaz holds and expresses this view, and that the Arab News publishes it.
    Again, thanks for bringing the piece to my attention. Maybe I’ll turn this whole ‘Comments’ exchange into a post.

  5. You might want to check out this article about the attempts to “Iraqify” the military operations. A curious effort, altogether, since, as last I knew, we weren’t intending to give the IGC formal control over security forces.
    Frankly, it’s not clear that we have any coherent policy. The actions of the CPA do not seem to be accelerating the development of a democratic governing structure, which you would think we would need to provide cover for a pull-out, regardless of how “democratic” it really is.
    I predicted to friends and family 3 weeks before the war that we would occupy the country for at least a couple of years, and then pull out after failing to install a democracy. So far, signs seem to point to this outcome, rather than our suddenly turning the country around at the same time that we are both encountering and generating an increasing body count.

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