Less than a month before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein signaled that he was willing to go into exile as long as he could take
with him $1 billion and information on weapons of mass destruction,
according to a report of a Feb. 22, 2003, meeting between President Bushand his Spanish counterpart published by a Spanish newspaper yesterday.
Here is the story; admittedly it is hard to judge the truthfulness of this report but in probabilistic terms it does not raise my estimate of whether the Coase theorem applies to President Bush.
Even if this offer was taken up by Bush, the US would likely have faced the same problems in governing the country as it facing toady. Remember that the actual war with Iraqi forces was quite smooth and over in a matter of days.
According to Coase himself, the “Coase Theorem” does not hold for anything in the real world. It only holds where transacting is costless, and transacting in the real world is never costless.
What “information on WMD” did he want to keep? I can imagine a Coasian monetary deal, but I can’t imagine the US agreeing to leave him with any transferable WMD technology, or him thinking the US would.
That detail makes me think this is either made up, or just an attempt to stall for time designed to prevent the US from accepting it.
I’m with TM – the question of why Saddam would want to keep his WMD information is far more interesting than the application of the Coase theorem.
I can’t understand how the Coase Theorem got into this, but the bit about the WMD information has to be a blow to the ‘Bush lied us into war’ meme.
Oops, that should be “pay them to go away.”
I guess non-economists might have misunderstood that too
There were rumors that Saddam was considering this and a lot of famous people lobbied him to this end. However at the end of the day, he preferred to go down in history as the man who stood up to Western aggression rather than the man who was willing to accept a bribe to resign his office. Recall in Bush’s final speech he used terms that if he left Iraq their would be no invasion. Presumably Saddam would have been very wealthy in exile.
This is an interesting application of Coase.
My reading of the situation is that it was not efficient for such a deal to go through. In other words, there were large welfare gains from Saddam being executed.
The Coase Theorem says that wouldn’t have mattered whether Saddam had the legal right to stay alive, or whether we had the legal right to kill him.
Coasean reasoning says that if had the legal right to go into exile and not be killed, then we could have bribed him not to do so, and that he would have accepted such a bribe. [Remember - if his death is efficient, our gains from his death exceed his losses].
On the other hand, if we had the legal right to kill him, there would be no bribe sufficiently large that he could pay us to stop us executing him.
So, he was doomed either way.
On the other hand, if killing him wasn’t efficient, then the report suggests that Saddam had it all wrong. He should have been offering to pay *us* to keep him alive, not the other way around as the report suggests.
If Saddam had read Coase, he might have known this and could still be alive today.
Poor old Saddam.
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That detail makes me think this is either made up, or just an attempt to stall for time designed to prevent the US from accepting it.
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