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Could Baathist Iraq have normalized relations with the West after Desert Storm, as Gaddafi did?
Could Baathist Iraq have normalized relations with the West after Desert Storm, as Gaddafi did?
Could Baathist Iraq have normalized relations with the West after Desert Storm, as Gaddafi did?
Could Baathist Iraq have normalized relations with the West after Desert Storm, as Gaddafi did?
not unless Iraq has something/can do something the West wants (as with Libya), there's an equivalent of Gaddafi looking at 2003 Iraq and going "hmm", or something happens to Saddam to put someone who isn't a Hussein in power. Or Saddam is a bit less, well, Saddam. On paper the easiest would be if the US decided to drop sanctions instead of do Oil-for-Food but would they want to?
Put a brain into George Bush jr.'s head and remind him that for the time being, Saddam was the only one who could keep al-Qaeda out of Iraq. That should lead to an unspoken but stable truce - "I stop giving you trouble if you don't give me any trouble". Later Saddam resigns and is replaced by a "moderate" leadership under his sons that normalizes the relation with the US.
Neither of Saddam's sons would have been moderate even if the sarcastic sense of the word - one was literally insane and the other was a less intelligent clone of his father; Iraq is fucked if either gets power.
Put a brain into George Bush jr.'s head and remind him that for the time being, Saddam was the only one who could keep al-Qaeda out of Iraq. That should lead to an unspoken but stable truce - "I stop giving you trouble if you don't give me any trouble". Later Saddam resigns and is replaced by a "moderate" leadership under his sons that normalizes the relation with the US.
Saddam 'refused to hand over Zarqawi'
DUBAI: Jordan's King Abdullah has accused jailed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein of refusing to turn over wanted extremist Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, now head of the Al Qaeda network in Iraq, before the US-led invasion.
"From the time Zarqawi entered Iraq, before the fall of the former regime, we made great efforts to bring him back and try him here, but our requests to the former regime were in vain," Abdullah said in an interview published yesterday in the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat.
The king said Jordanian authorities had intelligence on Zarqawi entering Iraq from a "neighbouring country," and knew where he was and what he was doing.
"We provided the Iraqi authorities with the precise intelligence, but they did not respond favourably" to Amman's requests.
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=112592
Jordan Ties Al-Qaeda To Envoy's Slaying
AMMAN, Jordan -- Jordanian officials linked the slaying of an American diplomat to a top al-Qaeda lieutenant Saturday as they announced the arrest of two men -- a Libyan and a Jordanian -- who they say confessed to the killing and to working with the terror group.
Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, one of the most sought-after fugitives tied to al-Qaeda, guided the men in slaying diplomat Laurence Foley and in planning what was supposed to be a killing spree against Americans and Jordanians, including "diplomats, embassies and local police" in Amman, Jordanian officials said.
"Unfortunately, [Foley was] the first and easiest target," Jordanian Information Minister Mohammed Affash Adwan said Saturday night.
Details about the arrests of Salem Saad bin Suweid, a Libyan, and Yasser Fatih Ibrahim, a Jordanian, were sketchy Saturday, and it was unclear how the men were captured. But Adwan emphasized that the men took orders from Zarqawi, who European and American intelligence officials have identified as a key planner and one of the top 25 people in the terror web led by Osama bin Laden.
"He directed [Suweid and Ibrahim] in Jordan. He gave them their tasks and the information. He facilitated their stay in Jordan. He helped provide weapons," Adwan said.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2002-12-15/news/0212150157_1_jordanian-laurence-foley-diplomat
Could Baathist Iraq have normalized relations with the West after Desert Storm, as Gaddafi did?
Saddam fostered a sense of strategic ambiguity with respect to his WMD arsenal because his conventional forces were so weak after Desert Storm, and he feared the Iranians far more than the United States. If Saddam had some kind of security assurance, it's possible he would drop the ambiguity. Alternatively, if something happened with Iran, it's possible Saddam could be called upon to contain them again.
I agree, that's why I put "moderate" in quotation marks. ITTL the normalization isn't based on Iraq having a truly moderate leadership, but a leadership that pretends to be moderate and the West pretending to believe it.
You've got your point that even that is much to ask form those sons, so perhaps we need Saddam himself becoming "moderate". He already was "moderate" in the 80's, wasn't he?
Neither of Saddam's sons would have been moderate even if the sarcastic sense of the word - one was literally insane and the other was a less intelligent clone of his father; Iraq is fucked if either gets power.
Fair enough, I didn't initially see the quotation marks at first through; so my bad on that part.
As for Saddam - even in the sarcastic quotation mark sense of the word moderate he was far from anything close to that, the man was radical, brutal, nasty and vicious even for a typical Middle Eastern dictator in the years before the Gulf War, and he only got worse once he started to become the borderline senile ultra-religious mental basketcase that he was by the point of the next war; and that rubbed off on most of his family really.
If you want even a moderate in the sarcastic sense of the word type of regime in a continuing Ba'athist Iraq; your going to have to remove the immediate Hussein family from the picture.
Is there any evidence that Saddam was actually ultra-religious after Desert Storm? The Baathist Party was a secular Arab Nationalist party, and Saddam assassinated quite a few Islamic leaders after the war. Saddam also did sacrilegious things, such as making a Koran with his own blood, which is prohibited in Islam.