NEWS: Saddam Offered To Step Down For Cash

Bear in mind that dictators are usually removed by someone from within their own palace. I'd guess he was more worried about internal rebellion than external attack*, and looking weak would be a serious mistake for him in that position.

*It's not as though that attack has been a sensible decision by the US, after all. He knew that at the time.

So, you favor the motives developed by Bush and the agenda of the neocons? You seem to suggest that overthrowing a government is acceptable because America is right and they are wrong. Further, this effort may be undertaken to secure access to that country's resources to benefit the US economy and carrying out the plan may require lying to the American people to secure their "support."

Do I have that right then?

If so, does this "right" or ability to make this determination come to you in the night as you pour over thinly produced epics about false idols?

doesnt anybody remember Hans "please give me another week look for the WMD" Blix?
that mother knew they didnt have any weapons and said so. oh, but no-one listened.

I didn't say I "favored" their agenda or methods. You asked "why Iraq, why now?" and without being a political science major, that's the most obvious reason I se for their motivation. As for your second paragraph...I have no idea what the Hell you're talking about. Say it in English and I might respond but I'm pretty sure the simple answer to whatever you were trying to imply is "no" anyway.

He didn't cooperate as in he wouldn't let the UN inspectors do their job. If he knew he didn't have the weapons and he knew they didn't exist, then why not just let them tour the facilities, show them there's nothing there, and get it over with? Instead, he wanted to give them the runaround, mock the West, and show he wasn't afraid to call someone's bluff. For all intents and purposes, Saddam was on probation in terms of the world accepting him. If you're on thin ice, you don't go out of your way to be uncooperative and confrontational. You have to meet the terms and conditions that allow you some modicum of freedom without giving the people trying to keep you in line a hard time.

Sure, it's easy to point out how many lives have been lost, how much money has been wasted, and how hopelessly stuck the situation is. But you can't have easy answers for hard problems. You can't condemn someone as an irredeemable monster in one breath and in the next say their behavior could be modified with negotiation and compromise. In all likelihood Saddam was a tired, frail, old man who legitmately wanted out of the world he built for himself. However, he wasn't willing to make or accept reasonable offers. There also wasn't any real incentive to comply because the UN is a fucking joke; "they send a few inspectors, I turn them away, they sanction me. Big deal, I'll just take more funds out of the treasury and use my cult of personality to make the people think the West is making them live in poverty and starve to death."

You can either stand on the sidelines, point out a problem, and talk about it until it solves itself or you can try to take action and clean it up. "So-and-So is a dictator and they won't comply with world regulations or make a genuine effort to be a part of the world community." So what? If they have no fear of consequence, why would they?

It doesn't matter; it goes back to my probation analogy. Part of the terms and conditions of Saddam remaining in power was keeping the rest of the world sastisfactorily convinced he posed no threat to his neighbors or the world at large. He did kind of, you know, invade Kuwait without warning and provocation. The fact that his government wasn't immediately dismantled following the end of the Persian Gulf War was a tremendous mistake and the curiousity to why it wasn't done almost makes me wish I was a political science major (almost). Whatever the reason, Iraq was at the mercy of the world governments that fought in the Gulf War. If Saddam didn't like someone looking over his shoulder or being held accountable as long as he remained in power, tough. He lost the right to govern independently and be trusted to maintain peaceful relations with his neighbors after invading Kuwait.

Before anyone asks, the US shouldn't be held (as) accountable for invading Iraq because if the UN worked the way it was supposed to, Saddam wouldn't have been able to blithely dismiss UN inspectors and cooperate when he chose the way he did. He would be held responsible by every single member nation to meet regulations, with clear and dire consequences if he didn't. The UN may have sanctioned Iraq with war eventually, but Bush was so gung-ho about it that he and the "coalition of the willing" jumped the gun and rushed it.

It took some time, but you finally revealed your support for the war and damage caused to Iraq, America, and their people. Rule number one; don't play us along - get to your point, reveal your true position and take your medicine like the big boy you hope to be, and move on.

There are far too many precedents involving one country invading another without provocation to justify the wobbly position you take suggesting that Iraq be hamstrung financially while mostly another single country (which was not invaded) decides its fate. A little time hitting the political science section of your public library could go a long way toward understanding war, occupation, and resolution.

Your assertions are littered with falsehood and an uncanny inability to assign any modest form of reason to the events.

Iraq did not surrender or agree to terms of surrender in the first Gulf War; conditions that must be present to suggest that another country be at the mercy of the governments that fought against them. The resolutions contained no language stipulating that to remain as the leader of Iraq; Saddam must behave in a certain way. Those threats came later, and they did not come from the UN. As a member of the UN, Iraq agreed - just as the US does - to adhere to it's resolutions, provided they are not unreasonable and do not cause serious harm.

Moreover, Saddam (or Iraq, since the most historians now believe that Saddam did not maintain much control over the country following the first Gulf War), complied with most every element contained in the resolutions. Looking past the rhetoric from both sides, the proven violations of the resolutions are by any reasonable person's gauge, modest at best. None of these violations presented a threat to as you say earlier "to his neighbors or the world at large" since Iraq was by all practical measures, bankrupt fiscally, organizationally, and politically. Iraq could not maintain its military, feed its people, or maintain its infrastructure. Now, I don't care what kind of leader you are, you might struggle against strangulation - even when your efforts are as pathetic as those demonstrated by Saddam.

Care to take part in making a list of the many nations that fail to adhere to UN resolutions? Where and when would you like to begin, because I can help, and the list contains nations most would agree are not run by despots?

This is the vilest form of tripe I've seen ushered to the boards in a great long while. You suggest that although the US invaded Iraq, it should not be held accountable, because....well, because the UN wasn't going to sanction a war with Iraq, and Bush and his minions suffered from premature ejaculation. Or pre-meditated ejaculation, or whatever term you want to use to describe the idiocy the world has witness for the past 5 years.

I BET YOU'LL VOTE NEXT TIME.

BECAUSE OHIO IS A LONG WAY FROM NEW YORK.

Or perhaps she's trying to be heard over the incessant apologist gum fwapping that's going on in here?

The inspections regime required routine inspections at scheduled times. Whether that meant every six months or every week is irrelevant; it shouldn't be something Saddam could just choose when he does and doesn't want to comply with without consequence. I don't have to know all the ins and outs of international law to do a quick search on Wikipedia to see his cooperation was "intermittent."

Hey, you're the one who was sliding insults into high handed prose and commentary written like riddles! Um, I mean, if you really think I "revealed" anything or I was "playing you along," go right ahead and think that if it makes you feel better.

Big boy.

Why would anyone trust a man with a name like Blix?

Apparently if you aren't part of the crowd that calls for Bush's head on a pike every time more news about Iraq comes, you're a purveyor of vomitious filth. There's no such thing as being level headed and giving credit where credit is due or making an open minded, honest assessment of the situation. The only option that would avoid war entirely would have been to not gotten involved in the first place. Every detail of Hussein's "bargains" can't be claimed as another nail in the coffin for Dubya and his lackeys, because had we taken him up on that offer, the self same people protesting the war would be up in arms about negotiating with a vile dictator and the same argumens would be made for oil, land, imperialism, etc. They're damned cause they did and they'd be damned if they didn't and I don't see the connection from refusing ridiculous and face-slapping offers and not considering all possible alternatives.

It doesn't matter how many times you consider it, a bad choice is still a bad choice. Everything looks relatively good in retrospect but that doesn't mean it would have been the best choice to make at the time.

this man might squeeze the charmin, but he looks a helluva lot more trustworthy than the gang in the whitehouse now.

He looks like he's rubbing a fat ass...

Why do you even bother? Is it because you're sick?

Look, while you teeter on your position the fact is that diplomacy is always the best choice and war is the last choice. You may not be comfortable with the negotiated terms when someone gets something you don't think they deserve, but that's how it works. Grow the fuck up.

Moreover, before you ask, why negotiate; the answer is because Saddam was the leader of that country, not Bush. When you want something under someone else's control, or you want to affect change over something under another's control, you negotiate. Where necessary, you apply pressure. Where you believe an injustice is being done, you find a way to either accelerate or amplify that pressure or you attempt to insulate those suffering from the injustice. That is the mature, intelligent, and sensible way forward. One day you may know enough to agree.

Bush and team did not exhaust the options, but that is not the worst of it. Nope, instead they went to war and killed more people than Saddam. They went to war and caused such extensive damage to the infrastructure that it may take decades to return the country to the level of operation it "enjoyed" under Saddam. They spent billions of dollars that will burden our children's children even accounting for that which will be inflated away. They stained the image of this great country and they rationalized our effectiveness in future foreign policy. All because someone failed to be sensible and got a wild hair up their ass that now appears to have grown into yours.

If you think that is a fair trade-off for our unwillingness to continue diplomatic efforts, you have a seriously misguided sense of right and wrong to complement your second-rate judgment.

This simply highlights your obvious ignorance. There was no peace agreement. A cease-fire agreement was imposed on Iraq by the US in the name of the UN Security Council following Desert Storm. Iraq forces left Kuwait.

I see that North and South Korea have entered into direct dialog and that North Korea has agreed to disarm some elements of their nuclear arsenal. I also remember reading a story some time ago about a wall coming down between East and West Germany. Neither of these efforts required the invasion of a country by US forces. But then again - neither of these situations involved a country with strategic oil resources.

You don't know me and you don't know what I do for a living or in my personal life. I can tell you I don't mine my perspectives from comic book heroes. The condescending posts issued from the comfort of my home are leveled only at the most foolish, reckless, and uninformed posts on these boards. Yours are so ill-considered as to have earned a particular interest.

Now my grammar checker suggests that I've written this at the 6th grade reading level. I hope you don't continue to find it high handed, prose-like, or filled with riddles.

This is a fascinating and horribly simplistic tactic I see used on these boards quite often by the right. They always tell the left what they would feel in a future, or parallel universe, rather than just asking. Here, for instance, he is actually debating people on the left and telling them what they would have done in a given situation, rather than actually asking them. If he did ask, he would then deny their reply because it does not fit into the Limbaugh/Hannity/O'Reilly liberal monster that has been created. If you listen to right wing radio, watch right wing television or read right wing blogs, they are constantly telling people what "a liberal" wants or would do. Often it is a gross exaggeration and more often, just an outright lie. Tyvron's post is a classic example, because who would really have been upset about a peaceful but not optimal solution to Iraq? How would the right wing respond to Saddam getting money to go away? We can only assume they would be not pleased. But in this case, using the fake liberal in his mind ends any question about a possible solution that probably would have done more good. There's just no talking to those liberals when you make up how they are going to respond, is there? Damn liberals.

Tyvron, please stop telling us how your fake liberals would respond in certain situations, since you obviously have not grasp of what a true liberal is like.

To adroitbeing:

To Fear The Reaper:

Actually, that is exactly what you did.

Actually, no, you claimed to know exactly what liberals would have said about giving Saddam money to go away, and I called you on it. I called you on the tired tactic that is putting words in other people's mouths. I did nothing else. Nobody ever said anything about an answer coming up a bow on top, except the president before he invaded Iraq.

I came away with that opinion, based not only on your simplistic tactic, but also because of the ridiculous right wing Iraq war talking points you have been spewing out in this thread. And, here, you have done it again. Not all liberals "Foam at the mouth and scream for blood" That is another right wing talking point created by the right wing. Some people are just horribly sad at the current state of our country.

Interesting. You are now responding to me and using someone else's argument. Did I write that in the original article? Or did someone else who is also against the war write it and you lumped us together because we are liberals? Well done. You've really disproved my point.

Interesting. Nobody is saying that. This is nothing more than more evidence that we can throw a top the pile of lies Bush told to get us into this war. Turns out all diplomatic efforts were not exhausted. But we already knew that, because we read.

Default. In what world does everyone get to walk away happy? You take the best solution to avoid conflict. Any military officer will tell you that. War is a last resort. Human life is not worth saving face, or feeling good about shit. The end result is the same - he is out of power. And that is all that matters. But you keep on with your excuses, it's making me care about your opinions less and less.

Saddam was a secular Arab nationalist. As was his Baath Party and the Baath Party in neighboring Syria.

He had what he had left from the Iran Iraq war. The reason he invaded Kuwait is because they were starting to shake him down for the enormous debt he'd racked up with them during said war. He was useful to them, and a number of other Sunni states (and us!) in keeping Iran bottled up. And in keeping his own horde of Shia down.

Well, we've removed him, and upset the entire applecart!

Actually, Kuwait was slant drilling across the border and stealing Iraq's oil. It was a new technology created by an American corporation named Sante Fe. Saddam went to the US ambassador and told them to make Kuwait stop or he would attack and we said, "Go for it."

Any country would have invaded.

FearTheReaper:

Where could he have gone? Iran? They'd kill him. Somalia? They'd eat him. North Korea? They'd use him for experiments. Syria? He'd have to drive a cab for a living.

The world saw what Saddam was like after his capture. I don't think he could function on his own. Bullies always need helpers -- a posse if you will.

But think of all the Cheetohs and Mars bars he could have bought. I think the WMD angle is just a cover-up for his real desires.

I'd be more worried about giving somebody like Snoop Dogg a billion bucks. Who knows what destruction they could do? Like buying Canadian dollars, suckahs.......