Thursday, November 06, 2003

[8:50 AM] You can generally count on CNN’s Aaron Brown to do and say the right thing. He led off tonight’s Newsnight addressing the NYT article on the Saddam pre-war back channel. And to his credit he asked all the right questions. Ken Pollack was there to pooh pooh any notions that the Iraqis were serious, and for all I know he’s right. But all his arguments came down to basically Saddam wasn’t serious because Saddam isn’t trustworth. Maybe he has more nuanced reasons for his thinking, but he wasn’t sharing on this program.

POLLACK: Yes, look, first I don't dispute any of Mr. Risen's reporting. I'm perfectly willing to believe that Imad Hage believed that what he had was the genuine offer. I'm even willing to believe, although here I start to get skeptical, but I'm even willing to believe that Saddam was aware of what was being offered. I also have no doubt that it was not a serious deal. In fact, everything that I hear leads me to believe that this was yet another Iraqi intelligence operation like we had seen countless Iraqi intelligence operations in the past. In truth, the Iraqis offered nothing that they hadn't offered before and there was no expectation that they would actually deliver on anything that they actually did offer.

BROWN: Well, but they did. I mean I'm not sure I disagree with you but they did offer, one of the things they offered, as I read it, was thousands, perhaps several thousand American soldiers or FBI agents or scientists or some combination of all of them to come into Iraq and do a weapons search if that's what the Americans wanted.

POLLACK: Well, look, how many times did the Iraqis publicly accept the proposition that they had to allow U.N. inspectors and, of course, the U.N. inspectors were determined solely by the U.N., free and unfettered access to all of Iraq and how many times did they renege on it, every time.

Pollack doesn't tell us what "everything he hear[s]" is or from whom he's hearing it. I don't doubt him, I'm just curious. According to the article and the Newsnight story, the CIA was in contact with the Iraqis through various other back channels. But Pollack didn’t say, and maybe he didn’t know if the things those channels heard were similar or at what levels on the Iraqi side were the people involved.

Risen, the author of the article offers his own speculation on the matter

RISEN: Well, I think the one, I mean I'm no expert on the Arab world but I do think that it's quite possible that third world countries and leaders of third world countries don't understand how bureaucratic Washington has become, that they don't understand that informal channels here are viewed in a much more suspect way than they are in many other parts of the world.

The idea I’m most interested in – and it would seem to be a similar dynamic at work for North Korea – is that Saddam went this route to capitulate quietly and not look defeated before the entire world. Pollack said that Saddam had plenty of chances to give it up before and because he didn’t we can’t take these overtures seriously (Pollack glosses over UNMOVIC inspectors by saying that because Saddam played games with unfettered access, he wasn’t serious; so where are the weapons that unfettered access would have discovered?). In a nutshell, my question is could this have been a face-saving effort on the part of Saddam? We shall see if anyone asks the questions or if this issue dies a quick death.

# posted 8:50 PM