And you are full of it. Saddam wanted the world to think he had WMD. That is a fact. Also, the head of the UN inspectors at that time even believed that Saddam had WMD. Most of the civilized world believed that to be the case. He was NOT cooperative. He played the same games that Ahmadinejad plays.
In the decade since the invasion of Iraq, a number of arguments to explain the intelligence failure there are now accepted as gospel truth. Certainly, there were plenty of mistakes made then that should be avoided in the future. However, many of these arguments seem grounded in politics rather than reality.
No Books Were Cooked - By Charles Duelfer | Foreign Policy
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One of the most obvious examples is the widely accepted statement that President George W. Bush lied about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) stockpiles. But here's the thing: If Bush knew that Saddam did not have such weapons, he would have been the only one -- even Saddam wasn't 100 percent certain about what resided in his stockpiles. In reaction to insistent U.S. and British statements about Iraq's WMD, at an October 2002 Revolutionary Command Council meeting, Saddam asked his own staff whether they might know something he did not about residual WMD stocks.
The intelligence wasn't cooked or slanted to make policymakers happy. It was just wrong. That made Bush mistaken -- but it doesn't make him a liar.
Intelligence agencies around the world erred in their assessments about Iraqi WMD. Some were more wrong than others. But the broadly held view by intelligence practitioners was that Saddam had capabilities that exceeded the limitations placed on him by the United Nations after the 1991 Gulf War. And in fact, Saddam was not fully compliant with the United Nations: He had ballistic missiles that exceeded permitted range limits and he had certainly had a long track record of blocking and deceiving U.N. weapons inspectors. His cooperation was always less than needed. But as it turned out, by 2002, the Iraqi president did not have militarily significant stocks of chemical or biological agents, and his nuclear program had been halted years earlier.
