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White House Says It “Exhausted” Peaceful Opportunities to Avert War With Iraq
The Bush administration “exhausted every legitimate and credible opportunity” to peacefully compel former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction and to step down before resorting to Operation Iraqi Freedom, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said yesterday (see GSN, Nov. 6). McClellan’s remarks came in response to a New York Times report yesterday that senior Iraqi officials tried to invite U.S. experts to come to Iraq before the war to search for weapons of mass destruction. The Times reported that the Iraqi offer was rebuffed. While refusing to say if U.S. President George W. Bush was aware of the Iraqi offer, McClellan said that if there had been a credible attempt to resolve the conflict peacefully, “we would have pursued it.” Hussein “had any number of channels available to him through which he could have communicated with the United States or members of the coalition,” McClellan said. “There simply was no need for backdoor contacts. The front door was wide open. If people wanted to communicate with us, they knew how to do that,” he added. “He [Hussein] chose a final act of defiance with the international community, and the result was that the coalition, the international coalition, was forced to act and follow through on what (U.N. Security Council Resolution) 1441 called for, which was serious consequences if Saddam Hussein continued, after 12 years, to defy the international community,” McClellan added. The former Iraqi leader also “could have gone to the world and said he was leaving his country and averted this military action,” McClellan said (U.S. State Department release, Nov. 6).
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