SADDAM and LATEST LIBERAL PATSIES
NY Post Editorial
November 9, 2003 -- Did Saddam Hussein put forward a last-minute
"peace offer" in March that might have made Operation Iraqi Freedom
unnecessary?
Iraqi intelligence officers reportedly contacted a Lebanese-American
businessman, Imad Hage, to offer a deal that included allowing U.S.
troops into the country to search for weapons of mass destruction, the
handover of a suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing - and,
don't laugh, free elections in Iraq.
(For the record, Saddam Hussein had already held an election in
October 2002, after which he declared that he'd won 100 percent of the
vote)
Apparently, the offer was rebuffed.
Now the New York Times, among others, is wringing its editorial hands
at the loss of "a realistic possibility" of a "coerced but peaceful
solution."
A solution that would clearly have left Saddam in power in Baghdad -
together with his torturers, mass murderers, rape squads and terrorist
allies.
This at a time when the Iraqi tyrant was becoming more Islamist, more
aggressive in his rhetoric and more effective in his circumvention of
sanctions.
In any case, it would have problematic, to say the least, to accept
this supposed offer, given what even the Times' original report
admitted was "a decade of evasions and deceptions."
Anyway, if Saddam had been truly serious about avoiding war, he could
easily have used normal channels, like his U.N. ambassador.
More important: The people who think that the Bush administration
should have called off the war because of this offer are forgetting a
very important thing: Namely, that the American-led invasion of Iraq
was never solely about weapons of mass destruction.
It was about ending the Saddam regime.
It was about fighting terror by the assertion of U.S. power and the
planting of a strong U.S. presence in the Mideast.
It was about shifting the war against Islamist terrorists away from
Western cities and onto their home ground.
Finally, it was - and still very much is - about bringing freedom,
prosperity and stability to a region where the rarity of those things
has played into the hands of terrorists.
None of this would have been obtainable by a last-minute agreement
with a vicious tyrant - who, anyway, never made a deal he didn't
break.
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