WMD: Absence Fooled Saddam Too

Jonathan Gurwitz wrote the following yesterday about the 2003 Iraqi WMD threat [San Antonio Express-News, 3.22.06]:

The media and the public are only now gaining access to a trove of official U.S. and Iraqi documents and tapes, much of it seized during the early days of the invasion. These sources make clear the reasons most major intelligence services [thought] Saddam continued to possess proscribed weapons of mass destruction and why U.N. weapons inspectors would never be able to locate them. . .

The U.S. military's Joint Forces Command engaged in a two-year project to analyze hundreds of thousands of documents and the transcripts of interviews with dozens of Iraq's political and military leaders.

. . . Researchers Kevin Woods, James Lacey and Williamson Murray provide the first in-depth analysis of the USJFC findings in an article for the May/June issue of Foreign Affairs, now available online.

"Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside" makes abundantly clear why the Bush administration believed Saddam had WMD and could use them again — because Saddam's own regime believed it had WMD and could use them again:

"When it came to [WMD], Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD."

Fearful of the consequences of delivering bad news to Saddam, Baathist leaders gave false assessments to their dictator and to one another about weapons programs. A footnote to "Saddam's Delusions" suggests that in the months following the fall of Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials in coalition custody continued to believe that Iraq still possessed a WMD capability.

. . . the blame for the tragedy in Iraq falls on a single person: the homicidal dictator who used WMD in the past and wanted the world to believe that he could do so again.