Report says Iraq tried to reach last-minute deal to avert war

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Friday, November 07, 2003

Report says Iraq tried to reach last-minute deal to avert war

Senior US officials said Thursday that the Iraq war could not have been averted by the reported last-minute efforts made by the former Iraqi regime.

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Senior US officials said Thursday that the Iraq war could not have been averted by the reported last-minute efforts made by the former Iraqi regime.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein "had a number of opportunities" to avoid war. For instance, the United States had given Saddam 48 hours to leave Iraq and avert war, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

"The United States exhausted every legitimate and credible opportunity to resolve this peacefully," he said.

Defense Department spokesman Lawrence Di Rita also said in a statement: "Iraq and Saddam had ample opportunity through highly credible sources over a period of several years to take action to avoid war and had the means to use highly credible channels to do that." "Nobody needed to use questionable channels to convey messages," he said.

A report in Thursday's edition of The New York Times said the Iraqi regime had tried to reach a last-minute deal with the United States in March before the outbreak of the war.

An influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman that Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal in March when American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border, the report said.

Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman, Imad Hage, they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct a search.

Hage was quoting as saying that the Iraqis also offered to handover a man accused of being involved in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 who was being held in Baghdad.

The messages from Baghdad, first relayed in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas J. Feith, the under secretary of defense for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi intelligence officers to open last-ditch negotiations with the Bush administration through a clandestine communications channel, according to the report.

The efforts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having the approval of President Saddam Hussein, the report said quoting interviews and documents.

The overtures were ultimately rebuffed, but the messages raised enough interest that in early March, Richard N. Perle, an influential adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with Hage.

Hage laid out the Iraqis' position to Perle, and he pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Perle or another representative of the United States, the report said.

Perle, widely recognized as an intellectual architect of the Bush administration's hawkish policy toward Iraq, said he sought authorization from CIA officials to meet with the Iraqis, but was told they did not want to pursue this channel.

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