Washington rejected sweeping Iraqi concessions on eve of war

By Bill Vann

7 November 2003

On the eve of its invasion of Iraq, carried out without United Nations
sanction and in violation of international law, Washington brushed aside
Baghdad’s offer of sweeping concessions that would have realized nearly
all of the Bush administration’s publicly stated war aims without the
massive loss of life that followed.

The somewhat murky story of the last-ditch Iraqi attempt to forestall
military aggression was broken Wednesday by ABC News and Newsweek
magazine. It involved a back-channel approach by senior Iraqi officials to
some of the leading Pentagon architects of the war, using a prominent
Lebanese-American businessman as an intermediary.

According to participants in the secret talks, representatives of the
Iraqi regime insisted that Baghdad had no weapons of mass destruction—the
pretext for the looming US invasion—and offered to allow the deployment of
thousands of US troops as well as US weapons inspectors on Iraqi soil to
verify this fact.

They further indicated that the Saddam Hussein regime was willing to
accept United Nations-supervised national elections within two years, and
would agree to support US policy in the region, including Washington’s
blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Finally, it offered to
grant US energy conglomerates preferential rights to the exploitation of
Iraqi oil.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan refused comment Thursday when asked
if Bush was informed of the Iraqi offer.

The revelations of the back-channel approaches from Baghdad expose yet
another lie of the Bush administration in its drive to war—that the Saddam
Hussein regime’s intransigence made military action unavoidable. In his
nationally televised speech on the eve of the invasion, Bush told the
American people: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American
people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war.”

Similarly, after military action had begun, Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld claimed that Washington had exhausted every other means. “The
American people can take comfort in knowing that their country has done
everything humanly possible to avoid war and to secure Iraq’s peaceful
disarmament,” Rumsfeld declared.

Both men were lying. The decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq
had been taken long before, and there was nothing the regime in Baghdad
could do to stop it.

The intermediary contacted in Beirut by Iraqi officials was Imad Hage, the
head of American Underwriters Group, an insurance company with
international operations in the US, the Middle East and Africa. Hage, a
Christian Maronite, had fled to the US during the Lebanese civil war in
1976, acquiring US citizenship. Returning to Beirut in the 1990s, Hage
became a prominent businessmen and political figure considered aligned
with Washington.

Hage established close ties to intelligence officials, both in the Arab
world and the US. Among the latter was a fellow Lebanese-American, Michael
Maloof, who worked in the Pentagon as a member of a secret intelligence
unit established by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy.
Feith, one of the group of right-wing ideologues brought into the
Pentagon’s civilian leadership under Bush, set up the unit with the aim of
uncovering ties between the Iraqi regime and Al Qaeda in order to provide
a pretext for war. No objective evidence of such links was ever produced.

Through Maloof, Hage was also introduced to Richard Perle, a close protégé
of Feith, who was then the chairman of the Defense Policy Board and an
influential adviser to the Bush administration. Together with Feith, Perle
was one of the principal advocates and architects of the war on Iraq.


Iraqi intelligence officer: “We want to cooperate”

Hage was contacted last February in Beirut by an Iraqi official, Hassan al-
Obeidi, chief of foreign operations for the country’s intelligence
service. In an article published November 6 by the New York Times, based
in part on an interview with Hage, the Lebanese-American is cited as
saying that Obeidi insisted Baghdad wanted to cooperate with the Bush
administration and could not understand why it was being targeted in the
so-called “war on terrorism,” since it had no links with Al Qaeda.

“He said if this is about oil, we will talk about US oil concessions,”
Hage told the Times. “If it is about the peace process, then we can talk.
If this is about weapons of mass destruction, let the Americans send over
their people. There are no weapons of mass destruction.” Hage added that
Obeidi told him the “Americans can send 2,000 FBI agents to look wherever
they wanted.” He also raised the offer of holding elections within two
years.

The meeting in Beirut was followed a week later by more talks in Baghdad,
where Hage met with Lt. Gen. Tahir Jalil Habbush, the director of the
Iraqi intelligence service.

“Based on my meeting with this man,” Hage told ABC News, “I think an
effort was there to avert war. They were prepared to meet with high-
ranking US officials.” Habbush repeated the offer to admit US weapons
inspectors, including 5,000 American troops, to hold UN-supervised
elections, and to approve oil concessions for US companies.

He also offered to turn over Abdul Rahman Yasin, wanted by the FBI in
connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Iraqi officials had
jailed the US-born Yasin in 1994 after he arrived in Iraq and had
repeatedly offered to turn him over to US officials.

Despite having placed Yasin on its most-wanted list and offered a $25
million reward for information leading to his capture and conviction,
Washington repeatedly rebuffed these offers. Since the invasion, Yasin has
disappeared, with some US officials suggesting he is active with Islamist
forces in the Iraqi resistance.

Hage also met in Baghdad with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz and
other top aides to Saddam Hussein.

The Times quotes from a three-page memo that Hage faxed to his main
Pentagon intelligence contact—Maloof—outlining the Iraqi offer. It
included an offer of direct aid to the US in combating terrorism and “full
support for any US plan” on the Israeli-Palestinian question. It went on
to affirm that “the US will be given first priority as it relates to Iraq
oil, mining rights” and that US troops and inspectors would be allowed to
enter the country.

Subsequently, Hage met with Perle in London to discuss the Iraqi offer. He
told Perle that Iraqi officials were prepared to meet with Perle or any
other top US officials to discuss “unconditional terms” for a peaceful
resolution of the mounting US war threats. Perle confirmed the meeting in
an interview with ABC News.

“Although I was not enthusiastic about the offer, I was willing to meet
with the Iraqis,” Perle said. “The United States government told me not
to.” Perle added that the approach through Hage was “one of many channels
going on,” indicating that similar approaches had been made through the
governments of France, Russia and Saudi Arabia.


“Somebody should have talked”

“It seemed to me there was a genuine offer that was on the table and
somebody should have talked, at least talked,” Hage told ABC News in
summing up his discussions with the Iraqi and US officials. According to
Newsweek, the contacts between Hage and Pentagon officials have become the
subject of an ongoing probe by congressional investigators into the Bush
administration’s handling of intelligence during the buildup to the war
against Iraq.

Some US officials “see the meeting, and others that took place overseas
involving Pentagon officials, as part of a secretive intelligence
operation that was set up by administration hard-liners within the Defense
Department and functioned outside the boundaries of the US intelligence
community—and without congressional oversight,” the magazine
reported. “‘It was a renegade operation,’ says one Democratic
investigator.”

Perle and Feith hardly seem the most likely prospects for an Iraqi effort
to avert a US invasion. Both men had been identified with the campaign for
a US war against Iraq since the 1990s, when they lobbied the Clinton
administration to adopt a more aggressive stance toward Baghdad. Both of
them are closely identified with the aggressive aims of the right-wing
Likud bloc in Israel. After September 11, 2001, they were among the most
prominent advocates of using the terrorist attacks as a pretext for
invading Iraq and adopting a policy of “preemptive war.”

It may well be that the Pentagon officials were utilizing the Hage
contacts as a means of monitoring Iraqi peace initiatives, with the aim of
blocking any attempt by other agencies to pursue peace proposals from
Baghdad.

Whatever the case, the revelations concerning these Iraqi proposals on the
eve of the US invasion underscore the criminal character of both the war
and the continuing military occupation of Iraq. Every pretext given for
the war has proven a lie, from the nonexistent weapons of mass
destruction, to Baghdad’s supposed terrorist ties, to the claims of Iraqi
intransigence.

The Bush administration would not accept a negotiated agreement in Iraq no
matter what concessions were offered. It was determined to wage a war both
to secure its unrestricted control over Iraq’s vast oil wealth and to
pursue an agenda of global domination by means of military force. It
wanted this war as a means of inaugurating a militarist foreign policy
doctrine that claims Washington’s right to employ armed violence against
any state that it perceives as even a potential future threat to US
interests.

Credible estimates of the Iraqi death toll in the war are placed at
20,000, with the fatalities among US and other “coalition” troops
approaching 450. Many thousands more have been wounded. These deaths and
injuries, whose numbers grow daily, are the product of an unprovoked war
that could have been halted at any time without incurring any threat to
the people of the United States.

The principal charge leveled at Nuremberg against the surviving leaders of
the German Nazi regime was that of waging an aggressive war. It is clear
that the members of the Bush administration who plotted and carried out
the war against Iraq are guilty of just such a crime.

The new revelations concerning Iraqi initiatives to prevent this war pose
the need for a full and independent investigation into how the war was
prepared, so that those who planned and carried it out can be held
accountable through impeachment and criminal prosecution. The demand for
such an investigation must be raised, together with the call for the
complete and unconditional withdrawal of all US troops from Iraq.


© http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/nov2003/iraq-n07.shtml

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