Baghdad made peace plea just before war, Pentagon admits

JUST days before US-led forces invaded Iraq, officials claiming to speak for a frantic Iraqi regime made a last-ditch effort to avert the war, but US officials rebuffed the overture, Pentagon officials said yesterday.

An influential adviser to the US Defence Department received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman indicating that Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal, they said.

The chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service and other Iraqi officials had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction and offered to let US troops and experts do an independent search, said officials, who discussed the matter only on condition of anonymity.

The Iraqi officials also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing who was being held in Baghdad, they said.

Iraq said long before the war and captured officials still maintain that the country had no unconventional weapons. Although none have been found in seven months of searching, finding the weapons and overthrowing Saddam were the main reasons the Bush administration gave for going to war.

US Defence Department officials confirmed some details of the prewar overture, first reported late on Wednesday by ABC News and The New York Times.

But they dismissed the idea that the offers could have averted war, since numerous other efforts by the United Nations and others had failed.

Messages from Baghdad, first relayed by the businessman in February to an analyst in the office of Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defence for policy and planning, were part of an attempt by Iraqi officers to persuade the Bush administration to open talks through a clandestine channel.

The attempts were portrayed by Iraqi officials as having Saddam's endorsement, but it was not clear if American officials viewed them as legitimate.

In early March, Richard Perle, an adviser to top Pentagon officials, met in London with the Lebanese-American businessman, Imad Hage, officials said. According to both men, Mr Hage laid out the Iraqis' position and pressed the Iraqi request for a direct meeting with Mr Perle or other US representatives.

The CIA authorised Mr Perle's meeting with the Iraqis, but eventually told him they didn't want to pursue the channel.

Mr Hage, speaking to the Associated Press in Beirut yesterday, said he believed the Iraqis he spoke to were desperate to avoid war.

"Definitely these people feared for their life and they realised that the threat was real," Mr Hage said.

"They were motivated for some deal, that some deal could be achieved."

Meanwhile, two American soldiers were killed near Baghdad and along the Syrian border, the US military said yesterday. Also, Polish forces suffered their first combat death when a Polish major was fatally wounded in an ambush south of the capital.