[The Great Satan]

I think the whole exile thing would go out the window if Bush went public. Can you see any way to sell that? I think if Saddam takes exile, and stuff dribbles out over time, people will shrug their shoulders and say, "Well, what else could we do?" But to openly beg Saddam to take exile after pointing the finger at him for 9/11 seems like a non-starter to me.

[nopardons]

Saddam won't take exile, no matter what. The president and his advisors KNEW that. This is all just for the general public of the world, who are ill informed, at best, and wouldn't care about the real facts , no matter when / if they came to light.

Saddam WILL be killed ; one way or another. Good riddance to " evil "; I say. :-)

[Wallaby]

>openly beg Saddam to take exile after pointing the finger at him for 9/11 seems like a non-starter to me.

I agree. I was conditionalizing on his not taking exile. Yet, the deadline for his accepting exile is only 42.5 hours away. Cheney said they shouldn't talk about state sponsorship of the anthrax letters until they were ready to do something about it. Doesn't the converse hold? They're ready to do something about it, but they aren't ready to talk about it? That just doesn't make sense to me. When they didn't want to be pressured into a premature war, it made sense to preserve ambiguity. It no longer does.