Lefties are bloviating about a leaked memo between President Bush and the former Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar just a few weeks before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb notes:

“The Washington Post reports on a story leaked to Spain’s El Pais about a meeting between President Bush and the former Spanish president Jose Maria Aznar weeks ahead of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It’s interesting to note how Bush discusses Saddam’s signals that he might accept exile from Iraq.

El Pais provides the Spanish language transcript here. And here’s Bush on the chances that Saddam Hussein might choose exile instead of war [translation mine]:

…The Egyptians are talking to Saddam Hussein. It seems he’s indicated that he’d be ready to go into exile if he’s allowed to take $1 billion dollars and all the information he wants about weapons of mass destruction. Gaddafi has told Berlusconi that Saddam Hussein wants to leave. Mubarak tells us that in that case, there’s a strong possibility that he’d be assassinated.

This begs the question: why would Saddam attach so much importance to information on Iraq’s WMD program? The mainstream media, the Democratic party, and many others have accepted that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, and that there is no reason to think that Iraq’s program posed a threat to anyone at the time of the US invasion. Small caches of WMD and evidence that Saddam intended to reconstitute the program at some point in the future have been downplayed in light of the failure to find the stockpiles of weapons that most intelligence agencies believed to exist.

Yet if the dominant narrative is correct-that Iraq posed no WMD threat-then why did Saddam stake his life on concealing information about the program? After all, he had to think that if he did not leave Iraq, there was every chance that he would be killed during or after the invasion. Why would it have been so important to hide evidence that merely confirmed the lack of any threat?”

Let’s not forget that the possibility - never entirely proved or disproven - that Saddam moved WMDs into Syria is further given creedance by this story.

Saddam, always looking out for number one, was protecting his ass down the line, knowing full well that his time as dictator was short he was trying to avoid the gallows.

Fat lot of good it did him.

Barcepundit has an accurate translation of the memo and notes it says nothing of what lefties have have been huffing and puffing over.

This portion completely nukes the idea that Bush’s mind was made up from the beginning.

“At one point Bush explicitely says: “Yo no quiero la guerra. S?© lo que son las guerras. S?© la destrucci??n y la muerte que traen consigo. Yo soy el que tiene que consolar a las madres y a las viudas de los muertos. Por supuesto, para nosotros esa ser??a la mejor soluci??n. Adem?°s, nos ahorrar??a 50.000 millones de d??lares” ["I don't want war. I know what war is like. I know the death and destruction they bring. I am the one who has to comfort the mothers and wives of the dead. Of course, for us [a diplomatic solution] would be the best one. Also, it would save 50 billion dollars” — again, my emphasis and translation]”