A Lebanese-American businessman has said he conveyed a last-ditch Iraqi plea to the US administration to avoid war but the approach was rebuffed.
The offer from Saddam Hussein's regime was turned down about a week before US-led forces invaded Iraq in March, Imad Hage told the BBC.

He said the Iraqi intelligence chief told him in Beirut that Baghdad did not want a confrontation.

The Iraqis also insisted they had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD).



Full Article

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3247461.stm

What was The reason for war???? Just wondering................hahah


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&e=11&u=/nm/20031107/ts_nm/iraq_usa_offer_dc_5

hey ... you can´t call the boys back in the last minute :rolleyes:

On the eve of its invasion of Iraq, carried out without United Nations sanction and in violation of international law, Washington brushed aside Baghdad’s offer of sweeping concessions that would have realized nearly all of the Bush administration’s publicly stated war aims without the massive loss of life that followed.

The somewhat murky story of the last-ditch Iraqi attempt to forestall military aggression was broken Wednesday by ABC News and Newsweek magazine

Saddam Husseins regime was willing to accept United Nations-supervised national elections within two years, and would agree to support US policy in the region, including Washington’s blueprint for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement. Finally, it offered to grant US energy conglomerates preferential rights to the exploitation of Iraqi oil.

the Iraqi regime insisted that Baghdad had no weapons of mass destruction—the pretext for the looming US invasion—and offered to allow the deployment of thousands of US troops as well as US weapons inspectors on Iraqi soil to verify this fact.

The revelations of the back-channel approaches from Baghdad expose yet another lie of the Bush administration in its drive to war—that the Saddam Hussein regime’s intransigence made military action unavoidable. In his nationally televised speech on the eve of the invasion, Bush told the American people: “Should Saddam Hussein choose confrontation, the American people can know that every measure has been taken to avoid war.”

Similarly, after military action had begun, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld claimed that Washington had exhausted every other means. “The American people can take comfort in knowing that their country has done everything humanly possible to avoid war and to secure Iraq’s peaceful disarmament,” Rumsfeld declared.

Both men were lying. The decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq had been taken long before, and there was nothing the regime in Baghdad could do to stop it.