By Wolf Blitzer
CNN Wolf Blitzer Reports

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A day after a visiting Iraqi opposition leader offered the U.S. military use of airstrips and bases in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, the Bush administration reassured Saddam Hussein's enemies. "We fully recognize that free Iraqis run risks," said State Department spokesman Philip Reeker. "The record of Saddam Hussein's regime in terms of oppressing and murdering its own people is all too clear." He went on to issue this warning: "Should Saddam Hussein reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction, threaten his neighbors or U.S. forces or move against the Kurds, we would respond."

But beyond noting that the United States already has a "credible force" in the region, including the monitoring of no-fly zones in the northern and southern parts of Iraq, the State Department didn't go into details. U.S. officials did, however, pointedly recall that Iraq's Kurds had been gassed by Saddam Hussein's regime in 1988.

The Iraqi government was mum in the face of Iraqi Kurdish opposition leader Jalal Talabani's offer of bases for the U.S. military in northern Iraq, made during an interview with me on CNN Tuesday. Instead, the official news media in Baghdad continues its own diplomatic offensive. Just as President Bush is maneuvering to isolate Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi ruler is moving to do the same thing against the U.S. president.

The Iraqis, for example, have now renewed their invitation to U.S. lawmakers to come to Iraq to check for the development of weapons of mass destruction. Here's an excerpt from the Ba'ath Party newspaper, Ath-Thawra.

"What does the U.S. Congress have to lose if it accepts the invitation from the Iraqi parliament and forms a delegation accompanied by a team of experts to visit the sites where their own administration claims that Iraq is hiding or producing weapons of mass destruction?"

A similar invitation was rejected earlier this month as nothing more than a propaganda ploy and there's no reason to believe that this new one will be accepted. In contrast, some European parliamentarians are clearly more inclined to accept. British Labor Party Member of Parliament George Galloway told me about his 90-minute meeting with Saddam Hussein last Thursday. "He was extremely calm," he said. "He was very determined, determined to press home the sincerity of Iraq's diplomatic moves, which over the last few weeks have been showering like confetti from Baghdad -- alas falling on stony ground so far."