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Saddam's desperate offers to stave off war
Washington dismissed Iraq's peace feelers, including elections and weapons pledge, put forward via diplomatic channels and US hawk Perle

In the few weeks before its fall, Iraq's Ba'athist regime made a series of increasingly desperate peace offers to Washington, promising to hold elections and even to allow US troops to search for banned weapons. But the advances were all rejected by the Bush administration, according to intermediaries involved in the talks....

...Iraqi intelligence was also offering privately to allow several thousand US troops into the country to take part in the search for banned weapons.

Baghdad even proposed staging internationally-monitored elections within two years. ...