Reported by Spanish newspaper El Pais September 26, 2007, Saddam Hussein had volunteered to step down in exchange for $1 billion and “all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction.”
If you don’t believe it, you can read about it here.
According to the New York Times in January 2007, the estimated cost of the war in Iraq is $1.2 trillion.
That’s right, trillion, with a T.
Now, I’m not saying we should negotiate with tyrannical despots, as such precedents would surely throw the world into some sort of decline. What this shows however, is that the President knew that there were other options for getting what he wanted without going to war, or at least, not going to war so quickly.
Funny how we didn’t hear about this option in the weeks leading up to the war back in the fall of 2002.
The failure of the Bush administration to disclose this information to the public is spin at its worst. With this information in the public eye, the United States would not have been so quick to jump into Iraq, and rid them of their stockpile of “weapons of mass destruction.”
More important than the dollar figure involved is, since the start of the war, more than 3,800 soldiers have given their lives for our country, untold numbers of civilian Iraqis have perished, and Iraq seems to slip deeper into turmoil each day.
Many of these tragedies could have been averted with the simple knowledge that Saddam was not, by any means, steadfast in his position of going to war with the United States. I think many who gave President Bush the authority to go to war would have changed their minds, or not decided so hastily, resulting in a much different situation than we have now. — Morgan Smith