Saddam offered to hold elections to avoid war with US

In the few weeks before its fall, Iraq's Baathist 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 George W. Bush administration, according to intermediaries involved in the talks.

As US and British troops massed in the Gulf, Iraqi intelligence sent out a range of compromise feelers through a number of channels in the apparent hope of forestalling the invasion or at least buying time.

The messages were sent through Syrian intelligence, and French, German and Russian diplomatic channels, and as the countdown to invasion ticked away, through retired CIA officials and a Lebanese-American businessman who met the Washington hawk, Richard Perle, in a London hotel.

The first approach appears to have been made last December through the CIA's former head of counter-terrorism, Vincent Cannistraro.

"I was approached by someone representing Tahir al-Tikriti -- the Iraqi intelligence chief also known as [General] Tahir Habbush -- who said Saddam knew there was a campaign to link him to September 11 and prove he had weapons of mass destruction," Cannistraro said. "The Iraqis were prepared to satisfy those concerns. I reported the conversation to senior levels of the state department and I was told to stand aside and they would handle it."

He later heard the Iraqi offer had been "killed" by the Bush administration.

Iraqi 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.

"All these offers had at bottom the same thing -- that Saddam would stay in power, and that was unacceptable to the administration," Cannistraro said.