We found out something new last week about the lead-up to the Iraq war.
According to a report in the Spanish daily El Pais, Saddam Hussein was considering a buyout of $1 billion to go into exile before the United States invaded.
Could be. With Saddam Hussein, a lot of things were possible.
But the more compelling, and the more dismaying, information in the El Pais report was about something we already knew but still have trouble accepting: President Bush was in a rush to invade Iraq. And not even an ideological ally who was one of his strongest foreign supporters could slow him down.
The news came from a leaked transcript of a conversation between Bush and his Spanish counterpart at the time, Jose Maria Aznar, less than a month before the war began.
The two leaders are at the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. It is Saturday, Feb. 22, 2003, and the topic is rallying the UN to further squeeze Hussein. But Bush already is looking beyond diplomacy to a military solution:
“The time has come to get rid of him,” Bush tells Aznar, according to the Spanish-language transcript that El Pais posted on its Web site. The newspaper said the transcript was prepared by Spain’s ambassador to the U.S. at the time, but it did not say how the memo was obtained.
“Saddam Hussein is not going to change,” Bush says. “He is not disarming. We have to get him right now.
“In two weeks we will be ready militarily. We’ll be in Baghdad by the end of March.”
Bush’s timetable was not off by much. On March 20, U.S. forces launched a missile attack on the outskirts of Baghdad, hoping to take out Hussein with the first shot. Three weeks later, Baghdad fell.
Nothing specific in the Crawford transcript supports the most serious charge of Bush’s harshest critics: that the president lied to the American people about Iraq’s arms stockpile.
But Bush talks far more about freedom, democracy and human rights in Iraq than about weapons of mass destruction. And the president exudes a certainty that Hussein must go — and that it is his mission to make that happen.
“I’m optimistic because I believe I’m in the right,” Bush tells Aznar at one point. “I am at peace with myself.”
Aznar, clearly, is not.
The Spanish prime minister focuses on two things: The importance of getting international support, in particular a second UN resolution implicitly approving the U.S.-led invasion. And the possibility of averting war altogether, including the potential exile of Hussein.
Bush tells Aznar that in talks with Egypt, Hussein had floated the idea of leaving power. He reportedly wanted $1 billion and the right to take with him information about weapons of mass destruction, perhaps as a bargaining chip or in an effort to cover his tracks. Again, with Hussein it’s hard to know.
But Bush makes it clear that exile or the assassination of Hussein from within is an unlikely outcome. And the president is in no mood to wait around for it to become more probable.
“My patience has run out,” Bush says. “I don’t think it will last beyond the middle of March.”
Aznar tries again.
“I am not asking for you to have infinite patience,” Aznar says. “Simply that you do all that is possible for everything to line up.”
Aznar pleads with Bush for help in convincing the world that confronting Hussein is the right course. He points out to Bush that the Spanish people oppose going to war and that Aznar’s decision to commit Spanish forces to an attack on a sovereign nation is a break from “a policy that the country has followed for the last 200 years.”
Yet Bush immediately turns the conversation back to himself and his certainty.
“A historic sense of responsibility guides me, too, same as you,” he says.
Bush talks positively about a quick war, about securing Iraq’s oil wells and enlisting the Saudis to help bring the petroleum to market.
“We’ve already planned for a post-Saddam Iraq, and I think there is a good basis for a better future,” Bush says, in yet another statement on Iraq that has come back to haunt him. “Iraq has a good bureaucracy and a relatively strong civil society.”
That others in the world saw things differently and were warning Bush about the complexities of deposing Hussein seemed to mean little.
Bush derides former French President Jacques Chirac as trying to promote himself as “Mr. Arab.” He says other nations on the UN Security Council should be careful not to oppose the United States lest they see their trade deals and foreign aid packages disappear.
As for the suggestion of Russia, Germany and France that Hans Blix and his team of UN inspectors, who finally were reporting some progress, be given more time to look for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush is dismissive.
“This is like Chinese water torture,” the president says. “We have to put a stop to it.”
Within weeks, that’s just what the U.S. did, put a stop to the inspections and then, swiftly, a stop to Hussein’s reign. But like Blix, the American forces who raced to Baghdad could not find weapons of mass destruction either.
———-
cmcmahon@tribune.com
