Strat­for and the Asso­ci­ated Press are report­ing that for­mer Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter Yevgeny Pri­makov, sup­pos­edly a per­sonal friend of Sad­dam Hus­sein, vis­ited Bagh­dad on Feb. 23. The pur­pose and results of the meet­ing remain secret, but a state­ment from Moscow reveals that the Iraqi pres­i­dent was asked — and agreed — to coop­er­ate fully with U.N. weapons inspectors.

Sad­dam has appar­ently agreed to destroy Iraq’s al-Samoud 2 mis­siles, the ones caus­ing such a stink in Wash­ing­ton for exceed­ing the 93-mile limit by less than 20 miles. Strat­for goes fur­ther, say­ing that Sad­dam has also agreed to a ver­sion of the Franco-German plan to intro­duce a flood of U.N. troops to back up weapons inspec­tors within in the next 10 days to show the Secu­rity Coun­cil that Iraq has been uncon­di­tion­ally disarmed.

Sad­dam Hus­sein will “do any­thing that he rea­son­ably can that is hon­or­able and pro­tec­tive of the sov­er­eignty of his peo­ple to pre­vent war,” said for­mer U.S. attor­ney gen­eral Ram­sey Clark after meet­ing with Hus­sein on Mon­day. Clark is active in the anti-war movement.

(In an inter­view prior to Primakov’s visit, Sad­dam told CBS’ Dan Rather that Iraq would not destroy the al-Samoud 2 mis­siles and instead chal­lenged the U.S. pres­i­dent to a tele­vised debate. Per­haps Pri­makov real­ity checked Saddam?)

Still… Strat­for also men­tioned a request from Sad­dam to Russ­ian Pres­i­dent Vladimir Putin to deliver a secret com­mu­niqué to U.S. and British energy com­pa­nies, invit­ing them back to Iraq after 30 years of being kept out. If Wash­ing­ton calls off the dogs of war, the com­pa­nies will be allowed to imme­di­ately return. A Russ­ian envoy is expected to deliver the terms of this deal to Bush in the com­ing days.

French pres­i­dent Jacques Chirac was report­edly enthu­si­as­tic for the deal, and British Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair was said to have reacted favor­ably. Wash­ing­ton has had no reac­tion yet, of course, and there’s no way to ascer­tain how gen­uine this offer from Sad­dam is. Has Sad­dam blinked, as he some­times has in the past? And given that it’s likely this pro­posal will embolden France, Rus­sia and China, all “P-5″ mem­bers of the UNSCR to throw up more diplo­matic road­blocks, will U.S. pres­i­dent George W. Bush accept this pro­posal as a face-saving plan to avoid an unpop­u­lar and costly war?

Ini­tial state­ments from White House spokesman Ari Fleis­cher indi­cate that the White House will reject this idea. (This is prob­a­bly another exchange between Helen Thomas of Hearst News­pa­pers and Fleis­cher, but it’s unclear from the Feb. 24 briefing.)

The U.N. weapons inspec­tors have deter­mined that Iraq has this mis­sile which exceeds lim­its that it agreed to, or were imposed on it by the U.N. Hans Blix has said it should be destroyed. If Iraq destroys those mis­siles, why isn’t that con­crete progress toward disarmament?

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, num­ber one, we expect that Sad­dam Hus­sein will destroy those mis­siles. The United Nations Secu­rity Coun­cil has called on it to do so, and unless he engages in fur­ther defi­ance, we expect that he will. But, num­ber two, as the Pres­i­dent said over the week­end, that would just be the tip of the ice­berg. And the rea­son for that is when a crim­i­nal holds a gun to your head and takes one bul­let out of the cham­ber, you still have to worry about all the rest of the bul­lets in the cham­ber, because they can kill you, too.

And the fact is, with Sad­dam Hus­sein, he still has not shown the world that he has dis­armed from the VX, the nerve agents, the bot­u­lin, the anthrax, all of which the United Nations found that he had in his pos­ses­sion in the late 1990s, which he has yet to account for. That’s the fear about what’s in the rest of the gun, in the other cham­ber — in the cham­ber in the gun.

So there’s no way that Iraq can do any­thing, really, to avoid war? Because if they begin to dis­man­tle their weapons, the Pres­i­dent still believes that they’ve got other bul­lets in the cham­ber and is –

MR. FLEISCHER: Under Secu­rity Coun­cil Res­o­lu­tion 1441, which was passed in Novem­ber last year, Iraq had an oblig­a­tion to imme­di­ately and fully dis­arm from all the weapons that were pro­hib­ited — and I just cited sev­eral of them. So if Iraq were to take one mis­sile out of the cham­ber that they left in the cham­ber — VX, sarin, bot­u­lin, anthrax — the world still has a lot to worry about.

I under­stand. And you won’t wait to see whether the French pro­posal or any other pro­posal could get them to take those bul­lets out of the cham­ber — you aren’t will­ing to take “yes” for an answer here on the mis­siles and any­thing else?

MR. FLEISCHER: Given the fact that the res­o­lu­tion passed in Novem­ber and called for full and imme­di­ate com­pli­ance, “yes” has not been a word that any­body has heard out of Iraq.

The White House will likely reject this idea for a num­ber of reasons:

1. It doesn’t achieve the Rumsfeld-Cheney-Wolfowitz-Perle plan for the Mid­dle East as a col­lec­tion of satrapys friendly to United States energy and secu­rity needs;
2. The world would breathe a sigh of relief not only because war was averted but also because Amer­i­can hege­mony was thwarted. Even though Wash­ing­ton could back down grace­fully by say­ing the U.S. mil­i­tary build-up pres­sured Iraq into com­ply­ing and accept­ing peace­keep­ing troops, other nations ruled mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal mad­men — yeah, I’m talkin’ to you, North Korea — with nukes would likely see this as a sign of weakness;
3. The Amer­i­can domes­tic polit­i­cal back­lash could be fierce.

The last item deserves spe­cial men­tion. And I will get to it.

But first, some will say Sad­dam is not seri­ous, because if he allows blue-helmets all over the coun­try and fully dis­arms, he will appear weak to his own peo­ple, to other Arab lead­ers and would not be long for this world. His dream of estab­lish­ing him­self as a modern-day Sal­adin would be over — and so, too, would his presidency.

But Sad­dam is a canny old fox, still, and here I veer into spec­u­la­tion, although of the informed sort. The Iraqi peo­ple are dread­ing war and the destruc­tion it would bring. While they would not be happy to see Sad­dam stay in power, they likely would be happy not to be blown up by Amer­i­can JDAM bombs. The Iraqis I met while trav­el­ing were fairly fatal­is­tic. They’ve suf­fered this long, they feel, the next life will be better.

(The INC and other mem­bers of the Iraqi oppo­si­tion will scream bloody mur­der, of course, but no one takes them that seri­ously any­way. The Kurds also would not be happy with this and might — I repeat, might — declare inde­pen­dence.)

The lead­ers of the rest of the Arab world already hate Sad­dam and know that he’s effec­tively defanged by U.N. sanc­tions. And while they no doubt feel sym­pa­thy for the suf­fer­ing Iraqi peo­ple, Arab lead­ers would con­sider the plight of suf­fer­ing Iraqis like they do the suf­fer­ing of the Pales­tini­ans — very use­ful for dis­tract­ing their publics from top­pling their own author­i­tar­ian gov­ern­ments, assum­ing the U.N. sanc­tions regime is continued.

And lastly, if Sad­dam remains in power after a U.S. mil­i­tary build-up, even if it results in U.N. troops all over Bagh­dad, it will still be seen as a vic­tory for him and a humil­i­at­ing loss for George W. Bush. Bush can’t allow that to hap­pen. Partly out of con­vic­tion and partly out of polit­i­cal neces­sity, Bush has posi­tioned him­self on the side of angels in this loom­ing war with his evan­gel­i­cal rhetoric of good and evil. The Chris­t­ian Right, neo­cons and other hawks who have taken a hard-line on Iraq believe they are doing God’s work, more or less, and if you’ve got God on your side, you don’t dicker with the devil. Bush, him­self, may be will­ing to cut a deal and get this whole mess over with, but I don’t think his right flank will allow him to do that. He’s very con­scious of the sus­pi­cion with which the Chris­t­ian right viewed his father. And he’s like­wise aware of how Bush I’s “no new taxes” pledge came back and bit him in the ass. If Bush II leaves Sad­dam in power, he will be fac­ing a dou­ble whammy with his base for leav­ing an evil tyrant in power and for break­ing a com­mit­ment to “regime change.”

This won’t cause evan­gel­i­cals and oth­ers on the hard right to vote for a Demo­c­rat of course, but if the econ­omy con­tin­ues to shuf­fle along, and North Korea con­tin­ues to thumb its nose at the United States, Bush’s num­bers likely will con­tinue their grav­i­ta­tion­ally assisted move­ment. A pri­mary chal­lenger could emerge from Bush’s right, siphon­ing off his base. And if the cur­rent weak­ness of the Demo­c­ra­tic field stays steady (Kucinich? Kerry? Give me a break), red-meat con­ser­v­a­tives might not be so afraid to take a chance with another GOP candidate.

And that could be Saddam’s game, in effect becom­ing the Fidel Cas­tro of the Mid­dle East. If he can’t lib­er­ate Jerusalem, Sad­dam might be sat­is­fied with humil­i­at­ing both Bush I and II, espe­cially if his con­tin­ued sur­vival was a decid­ing fac­tor in end­ing both pres­i­den­cies. Yeah, I think he’d be quite happy with that.

Which is why the White House can’t allow him to stick around.