Wonder how this will pan out?
Just days before U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq, officials claiming to speak for a frantic Iraqi regime made a last-ditch effort to avert the war, but U.S. officials rebuffed the overture, Pentagon officials said Thursday.
An influential adviser to the Defense Department received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman indicating that Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal, they said.
The chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and other Iraqi officials had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to let American troops and experts do an independent search, said officials, who discussed the matter only on condition of anonymity.
The Iraqi officials also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who was being held in Baghdad, they said.
Iraq allegedly said it had no WMDs. Then why did Hussein act like he did? Oh yeah, because he was crazy.
On the news this morning, they stated that the CIA informed Perle not to pursue. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the meeting would have averted the war. Hussein had lied in the past and he would have done it again.
Quickest Update Ever: U.S. intelligence officials have told Fox News that reports of a frantic last-ditch effort by Iraq to avert an impending war were simply a facade by “third parties, charlatans and independent actors” aimed at preventing the U.S.-led invasion.
November 6th, 2003 at 11:40 am
The person who wrote the news story doesn’t understand Arab political culture, which relies on deception, feints, delays, and misdirection.
Why Arabs Lose Wars
http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/AD_Issues/amdipl_17/articles/deatkine_arabs1.html
“These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare, which he terms “face to face,” Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection. Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that the Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political, warfare — what T. E. Lawrence termed “winning wars without battles.” Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core entailed a masterful deception plan. It may well be that these seemingly permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety, indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships.”