And this is very interesting too. Maybe Saddam is to blame for his death and the war too.
Lessons from Iraq 1: Why did we believe in WMD?
Of course, the main reason that everyone thought Saddam Hussein had WMD was that he acted like he had them. He made veiled threats to his enemies – not always too veiled, at that. He offered firm (if imprecise) reassurances to his supporters that Iraq was a power to be reckoned with. And he played relentless cat-and-mouse games with the U.N. inspectors, stalling them without explanation at random intervals as if he needed to move forbidden weapons out of this building or that one before letting them see it. The world watched this behavior and quite reasonably concluded that Saddam acted like a man who had every reason for confidence – a man with tools that could repel every enemy – a man, in short, armed with WMD.
Why did he act this way if he didn’t have them after all? In an interview he gave shortly after he was first captured by American troops, Saddam answered exactly this question. I don’t have the text of the interview handy, and have hunted in vain to find it again, so I have to reproduce the gist of it from memory. This means I may get the wording a little wrong, or the topics slightly out of order, but I believe I have preserved the substance faithfully.
First, the interviewer asked if he hadn’t been afraid that his resistance to American and international pressure would have the result it finally did have, namely an American invasion which drove him from power.
No, Saddam replied, that never crossed his mind.
Why not?
Because he thought the CIA knew everything! He thought the CIA knew that he didn’t have WMD. He also calculated that America would always support him in the end, because America is threatened by radical Islam; and Saddam, for all his many faults, always kept religion strictly out of government. So he thought he was one of our natural allies in the Middle East against the jihadist theocrats, and he assumed that we saw things the same way.
Then how could he account for all the speeches President Bush made warning him over and over to give up his weapons and comply with the inspectors?
Oh, that’s easy. He figured Bush was just blustering in public to look strong to his neighbors, the same way Saddam blustered in public to look strong to his neighbors.
Now we are getting to the heart of things. Why did you bluster like that to your neighbors in the first place? Why did you pretend to have WMD at all, when the reality is that you had been completely and successfully disarmed after the First Gulf War?
Because, explained Saddam, I had a lot of enemies. I had enemies abroad who hated Iraq, I had neighbors who would have loved to seize my oil fields, and I had enemies at home who resented all my years in power. If everybody had known that I was defenseless, my country would have been torn to bits by foreign adventurers and you could have counted out my life in days. The only way I had to protect Iraq’s sovereignty and independence, and to save my own neck, was to lie relentlessly to the rest of the world so that everyone thought they had something to fear from me. If you had been in my shoes, you would have done exactly the same thing.
