U.S. rejected 2003 Iraqi peace offer

Editor’s Note: The following report is excerpted from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin, the premium online newsletter published by the founder of WND. Subscriptions are $99 a year or, for monthly trials, just $9.95 per month for credit card users, and provide instant access for the complete reports.

Syrian flag

The U.S. in 2003 rejected an unconditional offer from Saddam Hussein for disarmament, U.N.-supervised elections and help in the war on terror, according to a report from Joseph Farah’s G2 Bulletin.

At the 11th hour, U.S. intelligence officials brushed aside the Iraqi offer for unconditional terms for peace, which was submitted through Syrian auspices.

The conduit was not unusual, as international confrontations sometimes are addressed through back-door communications.

The Syrians initiated the effort in January 2003 through an intermediary seeking to open a back-channel of communication with policymakers in the office of the Secretary of Defense.

At the time, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency was quoted as saying the Iraqis should be told the U.S. will “see them in Baghdad.” The spokesman added that the CIA was to have had a meeting three months earlier with Iraqis to discuss similar terms, but Iraqi participants never showed up.

Recent evidence, however, reveals a meeting had occurred in 2002 on similar unconditional terms, which the CIA had rejected.

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This rejection through the CIA channel prompted Syrian officials to look to other avenues to approach directly U.S. policymakers who apparently were not receiving information on such overtures. By then, the CIA-Syrian intelligence channel was broken.

Iraq had offered six unconditional terms which were channeled through to Defense Department policymakers. The terms were:

• Full support of America’s Arab-Israeli peace process.
• Support for U.S. strategic interests in the region.
• Priority to the United States for Iraqi oil.
• Elections within two years under U.N. auspices.
• Disarmament – direct U.S. involvement in disarming Iraq.
• Full cooperation in the war on terror — hand over Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was involved in the 1993 bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center. To this day, he still is at-large.

The Iraqis also offered to allow the U.S. to bring some 5,000 troops into Iraq to search for weapons of mass destruction which some in the policy chain had determined were no longer in Iraq.

At the time, policymakers questioned whether the issue of WMDs was a viable basis for invading Iraq.

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