Once More With Feeling

I can’t resist one more post. No, no, this is the last. Please, stop begging. One has to know when he's run an audience out of the room. Time for the hook, and all that. But I have to respond to a news report roaming about the Web and originating from a Canadian news service.

First, where is Canada, anyway? I think it’s north, but not sure if it’s been slowly floating away from North America and, when last seen, headed toward France. Show of hands; how many people can name the Canadian prime minister. Hint: he’s named after a guitar made in a town in Pennsylvania where The Band visited feeling half past dead. For the zero or one who read this Blog and aren’t that obscure, his name is Paul Martin and the only reason I know this is because he’s been in the news lately under a cloud of scandal. He hasn’t been seen much in Canada’s capital these days. Which is in Toronto. I think. Maybe somewhere else. But I digress.

Not to bury the lead again, but the story from our Molson-drinking, hockey-playing, can’t pronounce the letter U neighbors is that the decent Sheikdom of the United Arab Emirates offered Saddam exile, he accepted, and the war all could have been avoided. It would be a good story and enhance other story lines deriding the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war, except for the fact that it’s not true, and the guy who made the offer is dead and the one who supposedly accepted isn’t too happy with us at the moment.

The reason it’s not true is because it was supposedly agreed to at a February 2003 Arab summit hastily called in Egypt to halt the possible spread of self-rule in a region that boasted only free elections in Israel. The summit started, the parties bickered, and ended early without so much as an agreement on a joint press statement to be given several state-run news agencies. It was so bad at the summit that an aging and terminally-ill Muammar Gadhafi had harsh words for the Saudis because they had allowed U.S. troops to get their boots shined within their borders before heading into the Iraqi desert. The Saudis, their panties always in a bunch, returned the volley by reminding Gadhafi who put him in power in 1962 – blowing the cover off a carefully-guarded 40-year-old story in which the Saudis admitted they were behind the military coup. It was not a summit about a unified Arab front. Instead it was a signal to the West that each of the countries was only looking after their own backsides and taking the position: screw Saddam and the camel he rode in on.

The bottom line is that several offers of exile were presented and even some accepted for a period of time. The hitch in all of them was the fact that Saddam wanted guarantees that he wouldn’t be brought before The Hague on war crimes. The guarantees were made but Saddam, being the paranoid that he is, didn’t believe other countries could ensure he wouldn’t be nabbed while sitting on a pile of food-for-oil money by a team of Rangers. Maybe with good measure, too. Perhaps the U.S. could be blamed for not persuing some of the exile plans, but all of them had flaws and nobody seemed willing to negotiate, least of all Saddam who saw himself in the larger light as a modern-day Prophet Mohammed battling Qoreish tribes (i.e. the U.S.) to return to Medina.

The best offer for Saddam came from the Russians but he turned it down on the same grounds, causing grumbling in Moscow, Paris, and Tehran, all centers of high finance profiting off the largess of a see-nothing U.N. The fact is that Bush did not ask his Administration for a go, no-go on the war until March 15, two days before bad intelligence caused the delivery of four 2000-pound bunker busters to be dropped at Dora Farms, thus starting Iraq War, the Sequel. True, the plans had been laid, but the Administration welcomed all reasonable exile offers to avoid war. Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn’t know this president.