FBI agent: Saddam lied about WMDs to fake out Iran
posted at 9:00 am on November 12, 2007 by Allahpundit
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Spot the flaw in this logic.
LESTER HOLT: On this Veterans Day, with American troops still embroiled in Iraq, new details are emerging about some of the issues that led the U.S. into war. The secrets of Saddam Hussein are revealed in a new book that includes details from an FBI agent who spent months with the Iraqi leader after his capture. Here’s NBC justice correspondent Pete Williams.
PETE WILLIAMS: Saddam Hussein told his American captors that he so feared Iran, he wanted Iranian leaders to believe that he had nuclear and biological weapons. So he planned to fool the U.S. by, among other things, stalling U.N. inspectors to make it appear he had something to hide, weapons of mass destruction or WMD. But he hoped the post-Gulf War sanctions on Iraq would dissolve, allowing him to pursue a nuclear capability. That’s what he told the only American to extensively debrief him after he was captured in 2003, according to investigative reporter Ron Kessler.
RON KESSLER: Saddam said that if America thought that he had WMD, then, of course, Iran would, and this would fulfill his goal of making sure that Iran did not want to attack Iraq.
A few hundred thousand American troops were massing across the border in Kuwait to knock him out — and Saddam was worried about Iran? This subject came up a few weeks ago in the context of Rudy’s post hoc justification for invading, namely, that if we hadn’t done so, Saddam would have had no choice but to restart his nuke program to keep pace with Tehran. In that sense, the war was true preemption. But follow out the counterfactual. Let’s say Saddam went to the UN and U.S. in February 2003 and came clean: he had no program, it was all a decoy to keep the Iranians honest, what can we do about this unfortunate misunderstanding? What would have/should have happened? Even in the unlikely event that his revelation derailed the war, it would have left Iraq cheek by jowl with a soon-to-be nuclear-armed Iran that no longer had to worry about any Iraqi deterrent. Presumably they would have used the bomb as leverage to extend their influence in the southern Shiite areas, knowing that Saddam wouldn’t dare act against them. You can take it from there.
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Saddam didnt think we’d actually invade though. He thought the UN and France would save him. Right up until we went in at which point it was “Oh S***” and unstoppable.
Dash on November 12, 2007 at 9:07 AM
Who knows what was going though that pathetic mind? You can’t use logic to analyze stupid people that do stupid things. You just say…gee, that was stupid.
right2bright on November 12, 2007 at 9:08 AM
I can’t buy the idea that Saddam was just “stupid.” Evil, yes, he screwed up bigtime, yes, but stupid? He was in control of Iraq far too long for that adjective to apply.
Obviously he did make a mistake in believing he would survive us. But, as Dash pointed out, he was counting on France and the UN to stop us (And he paid them good Oil-for-Food money to stop us, too). Also remember that he had already survived one war with us, when we had him right up against the ropes and suddenly pulled back.
The logic is not flawless, but I can see how someone in Saddam’s position could have followed it.
Lancer on November 12, 2007 at 9:19 AM
This is the line that jumped out at me, and it’s the best justification for taking him out. Saddam was the WMD.
techno_barbarian on November 12, 2007 at 9:20 AM
I can believe this story. But the problem is it is like someone using a toy gun when the cops have their weapons drawn. That guy will get shot dead, and afterward when they see that the gun was not real, it’s too bad for the dead guy and not fault of the cops.
I still believe that he had some WMD’s that were hidden or carted to Syria at the outset of the war. . . or just before. It would not have taken much to make such a slight of hand move.
ThackerAgency on November 12, 2007 at 9:22 AM
I’d like some confirmation on this fairy tale.
Where’s Saddam?
Heh.
fogw on November 12, 2007 at 9:23 AM
Pretty good analysis ,AP. Amazing how quick the media can dig up any info that they believe will support their agenda; of course facts or logic need not apply.
The thing that bugs me most with this subject? What about the warehouses full of documentation left by the Iraqis on this and other matters? No other fallen regime other than the nazis left so much behind. Much of what was left, and is still being translated, could have destroyed the left’s main talking points that they have used to bash Bush over the head with for several years. A while back, Tony Snow was asked why Bush didn’t use this treasure trove to counter such attacks. The reply was that Bush “didn’t want to reopen that can of worms”. Brilliant. And you wonder why things got so screwed up?
tomk59 on November 12, 2007 at 9:28 AM
I’ve heard another similar theory along those lines: He wanted them, provided funding to various department heads for development, who enjoyed large budgets and power and skimming from the top, and provided occasional ‘progress reports.’
With this theory, Saddam truly believed he had stuff he wasn’t supposed to, which justified the inspector brush-off, as well as explaining why he didn’t ‘come clean’ at the last moment, knowing he was about to lose everything.
Either way, it sounds like it was STILL a good idea to go in there and clean up that rats nest!
JamesLee on November 12, 2007 at 9:35 AM
Saddam didn’t think America had the will to invade Iraq and he was right. America didn’t have the will, but Bush did.
BohicaTwentyTwo on November 12, 2007 at 9:37 AM
We’d probably have given him the same deal we gave to Khaddaffi in Libya, and then we (and everyone else) could have been focusing on Iran’s program the last four years. Would have been nice if he had done that, but he made his choice and paid the price, as have we.
Dudley Smith on November 12, 2007 at 9:38 AM
This is what many people have been assuming for a long time. You’ve heard the joke. “Even Saddam thought he had WMDs!”
Mark Jaquith on November 12, 2007 at 10:03 AM
This just adds one more fleck of doubt to the pile I have about our FBI
1. Why would I believe the confession of head-case Saddam to his infidel captors? Was Saddam playing to us, to the world, or to his insane megalomania?
2. Why would I assume Saddam would keep pertinent evidence in documents, on computers or materials while an enemy army takes months to mass at his border with the intent to find such evidence and try him for that evidence?
3. Why would I trust the documents that were found when Saddam had months to manipulate them?
Two pieces of evidence were sufficient for me
1. a jet aircraft used to train hijackers
2. Saddam had previously attacked Kuwait and set the oil fields burning for a year
Saddam should have been taken out by a hit man just for burning the oil fields
AP took apart the Story but the FBI agent ate the worm. There are so many fish in our government pond they couldn’t see a whale coming
entagor on November 12, 2007 at 10:04 AM
So, Saddam lied, people died? What will the far left do with all those incorrect t-shirts?
Think that the moment that lie escaped his lips flashed before his eyes as the noose tightened around his neck?
ej_pez on November 12, 2007 at 10:16 AM
Prior to our actually physically going into Iraq I’d be much more afraid of Iran than the US. I absolutely believe Saddam thought he was safe from anything more than a few cruise missiles or token bombing campaigns. And what did he care about that?
France’s Chirac gave him exactly the cover he needed in the UN by declaring he would veto “whatever the circumstance”. So that as they say, is that. This is in addition to Russia, Germany and China backing Saddam.
I firmly believe to this day that Chirac in large part made this war necessary by providing cover and forcing our hand to be called or shown as a bluff.
Dash on November 12, 2007 at 10:19 AM
Pride comes before a fall.
I think there is some truth to saddam’s WMD dis-information campaign towards his former hot war adversary, Iran. Ten years after, saddam & co. were still licking their economic & military wounds from that bloody cross-border slug fest, plus he had a hot bed of pro-iranian shia revolution wanna-bees in the south funded, fueled, and armed by his former adversary. (Sound familiar?)
So-damn-insane was grasping at any tool available short of outright war -which he could not afford- to retain power & prop up of his reign of terror.
As for the West and America, saddam was playing the long odds in a feckless game of chicken. The impotent U.N. was involved, and after the ‘dodged bullet’ from gulf war one, he was willing to roll the dice. He lost. The hang man won.
Pride comes before a fall.
locomotivebreath1901 on November 12, 2007 at 10:23 AM
Bush had the will. He just didn’t have a plan.
It is interesting to play Niall Ferguson here with the counterfactuals. We learned post-invasion that Operation Desert Fox degraded Iraq severely and that containment had Saddam pinned in. Leaving Saddam in place as a counterbalance to Iran would have added leverage to our threats of military action against Iran’s nuclear program and saved us, ultimately, more than a trillion dollars. Probably oil prices would be lower today and the dollar stronger.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 10:24 AM
Saddam certainly pursued WMD and had a nuke program. How do I know? The NY Times said so.
Granted, they said so in the context that Bush screwed up for publishing the documents… but they did say so.
Laura on November 12, 2007 at 10:46 AM
As Dash points out, France and Russia assured Saddam that they would keep the US at bay. Come on guys, this is the same guy who thought the US wouldn’t react when he went all gung ho into Kuwait. This is the dude who thought he could beat Iran and ended up bludgeoning his country.
Perhaps Saddam had too many Yes Men around him to know just what in the hell was real.
Seixon on November 12, 2007 at 10:46 AM
Who told you this? No plan survives first contact. I’m not saying there is no room for second guessing but to say there was no plan is the realm of nonsense.
So your “plan” is to invade then leave Saddam in power. Had we only dont that then everything would be bubblegum and lollipops.
Only, we had already done just that in 1991 and it didnt quite get us anywhere other than pushing it off for a decade and having our jets shot at while patrolling the no-fly zone. Good plan.
Dash on November 12, 2007 at 10:47 AM
He might have been a counterbalance. Was he defanged? Or would he have been taken out by the Islamists if we had not done it first?
This I cannot guess. Saddam might have lived another 20 years but as he got older and weaker the islamists would have gotten bolder. Iraq was always the first target of Iran
We would have saved a lot of borrowed money.
On the other hand we have a major foothold next to Iran because of the war. I am personally on the side that WMD were in progress in that nation simply because anyone with a million dollars can get a startup biologics kit from ex-soviets. The anthrax on the 911 hijacker is a simple example
Saddam already had chems
entagor on November 12, 2007 at 10:52 AM
This is the worst playground story I’ve heard in thirty years.
The FACT that saddamn HAD WMD’s is that, a fact. Hell, he used them on the Kurds.
We know he had huge stockpiles of WMD’s, thousands and thousands of them. (We found 500 old ones that saddamn lost, he had so many.) We just don’t know where they ARE NOW. If any of this story above were true, it would be a cover for Syria where the WMD’s most likely are still held today.
Between this and Richardson, I don’t think the Dems are getting any smarter.
shooter on November 12, 2007 at 11:06 AM
They had a lot of plans, but not a coherent strategy that was respected by analysts. Many have been critical of the quality of the planning and occupation–Anthony Zinni and Greg Newbold to name two of the many.
To imply that since “No plan survives first contact” then all plans are equally flawed doesn’t withstand historical scrutiny.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 11:22 AM
These are good points. My position is that 1.) The opportunity cost of doing Iraq has been too high. 2.) If it could have been done well, Bush/Rumsfeld/Bremmer didn’t execute ably. 3.) Now that we are in, there are benefits and it is best for us to invest further rather than leave a bigger mess.
Was containment perpetually sustainable? No. Was there a problem with Saddam’s country crumbling and him falling in a coup to Sadr or other radicals? Yes. We effected the coup ourselves and hopefully we’ll be able to midwife the infrastructure for a liberal democracy–we won’t know for decades though.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 11:32 AM
Ok so now they had lots of plans. Just not any plan universally accepted by people you pick that disagreed with said plans. And of course, the people like Zinni had plans that everyone agreed was super fantastic, but decided to go the other route instead.
Now who’s to say another plan would have worked better, I dont know. Surely hindsight has been valuable here as it always is and mistakes were made. That all said lets not get on our soapboxes just yet and let a little air out of the heads of the “I knew it!” crowd.
Dash on November 12, 2007 at 11:36 AM
I guess I have to explain this to you, most would understand.
You can be brilliant, a great leader, and still make stupid mistakes and stupid decisions, in other words be stupid. Aggression does not equal intellect. You can rule by power and intimidation, and still be stupid when faced with decisions you have no control over. He may have been “gifted” in ruling and killing his people, but he was stupid in international politics. He may have struck fear because of some militiary and political moves, but he was stupid in trying to face down a world power.
In other words, he was stupid, making stupid decisions.
Your mistake is what gets us into trouble. You think these guys think rationally, that they are not stupid. Well they are, and we apply intellect to stupidity and we can’t understand why they do certain things.
You overestimate, just like any bureaucrat, that’s right you have the mindset of a bureaucrat. Don’t offend him by calling him stupid, he was a ruler, a killer and torturer for years, he can’t be stupid…see how stupid that sounds? Every body should fear stupid people, you can’t predict what they do.
right2bright on November 12, 2007 at 11:46 AM
Three words for PETE WILLIAMS, FULL OF $HIT…
doriangrey on November 12, 2007 at 12:06 PM
You are getting hung up on the use of the informal word “plan”–having many plans not tied to a master plan or “strategy” is a problem. The invasion and occupation were overly costly in terms of lives and dollars due to a breakdown in communication between State and Defense, a reliance on intelligence that was thin and misleading, an overestimation in the effectiveness of Ahmed Chalabi, and lack of planning for the occupation.
Officials love using the passive voice when things go wrong. “Mistakes were made”. Heaven forbid that a person ever actually “makes a mistake”.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 12:11 PM
Fear isn’t a strategy. You can apply rational thought to hunting an animal, even though the animal does not have the ability to reason.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 12:20 PM
There’s something Orwelian about this whole discussion. The world knew that Saddam HAD wmd’s and used them.
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE WMD’S THAT HE HAD?
…crickets chirp…
Mojave Mark on November 12, 2007 at 12:29 PM
I don’t understand what you are saying. What does an animal have to do with stupidity?
You don’t fear stupid people? OK, to me a stupid person with a gun is someone to fear. With fear comes a strategy. When you see stupid people in power, you create a strategy different than if a rational person was in power. If Australia has the Atomic Bomb, I have no fear, therefore we I would not waste time in developing a strategy. If Iran has the bomb, then a stupid foolish person in in control, that I fear, and we should develop a strategy. That strategy is born out of the fear that they would mis-use it. Get it?
right2bright on November 12, 2007 at 12:31 PM
Rumsfeld was in Iraq during their war with Iran and while they were using chemical weapons on a daily basis. He was influential within the Reagan administration of increasing U.S. aid to Iraq at that time.
The selling point for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was that Saddam was an imminent threat to the US, and that we didn’t want the “smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”. If Cheney and Rice had pushed a causus belli of “We want to clean up old chemical weapons” it wouldn’t have been as persuasive.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 12:39 PM
Not at the moment. It is more a function of someone’s ability to project power. Was Hitler stupid? Were Stalin? Mao? Tojo? I guess you could make a case for saying “yes” or “no” for each. However, they all had differing capacities to project power, and anticipating how people like that might do so is a necessary part of prioritizing security spending.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 12:53 PM
Spoken like a true bureaucrat.
right2bright on November 12, 2007 at 12:57 PM
The military is a bureaucracy.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 1:01 PM
We’ve heard this theory before. A couple years ago actually. “He pretended for his own protection.” I still don’t buy it, intelligence all over the world said he had it, and not just because he was pretending he did while saying he didn’t.
RightWinged on November 12, 2007 at 1:28 PM
An Iraqi general and a Russian have come out with books detailing the transport of the WMD material to Syria. John Loftus reported Jordanian television news story of one truck sent from Iraq getting stopped at the Jordanian border and confiscated.
Also there is the little matter of the UNSCOM report on Saddam’s WMD’s. Now you can call me cynical if you want, but if the braindead UN can find WMD’s, well crikey, I guess they gotta be there.
The UNSCOM (sp?) report was pretty exhaustive. There is also a pretty large collection of chemical weapons recovered since the invasion….
dogsoldier on November 12, 2007 at 3:53 PM
While there is a certain amount of sense to this story, it is probably not the complete truth.
As we all know, he did have WMD and used them, against the Kurds AND the Iranians.
He picked a fight with Iran that lasted 10 years. He expected a cakewalk and found he was riding a tiger instead. The war with Iran cost him.
Then, he claimed that the Kuwaitis went back on their financial support, so he invaded them.
Then, the US lead coalition litterly smashed his military and a good part of his infrastructure in 1991. His country is then placed on all sorts of embargo lists, especially concerning weapons.
12 years later, whatever WMDs he had left (and we’ve found at least 500 artillery rounds of Sarin, others are presumed to be in Syria) that we didn’t destroy in the caches we found in 1991, were past their “best use by” date, because we’re pretty sure now that he was unable to restart his NBC program.
So, in 2003, this was the situation:
The mullahs of Iran still hated him. And he knew it.
We were actively preventing him from attacking the Kurds in the north, effectively confiscating his northern oil fields and the pipeline through Turkey.
We were enforcing a “no-fly” zone and a sea-lane “oil exclusion zone.” Everytime he turned on a missile battery’s radar, we’d blow it up, adding to the weakening of his military.
He’s surrounded by “yes men” who are afraid (with good reason) to tell him news he doesn’t want to hear.
He HAS to believe that Iran would, sooner or later, want payback for the war that HE started. And he has to know that Iran had a nuclear weapons program — and he didn’t.
So what does a man, who desperately wants to hold on to power knowning that losing control would mean his death, do?
He lies and misleads the world into thinking he has WMD. He believes that “world opinion” would prevent an invasion. He pays Ramsey Clark to lead the opposition to any invasion (Clark was a registered lobbyist of Saddam’s government before the invasion).
He walks a tightrope…and falls off when we invade.
The fact he retained at least 500 Sarin rounds and at least 2 Mustard rounds that were used in IEDs against us, proves that he lied about his remaining WMD. Contrary to the MSM and liberals ‘pooh-poohing’ the find, while old, with some corrosion, these WMD were capable of being used OR the contents could have been repacked into new casings. They were still lethal if used against unprotected people.
This (his non-compliance with the cease fire terms to destroy them) as well as his retention of SCUDS and other long range missiles, was reason enough to invade him. The fact that he attempted to murder former President George H. W. Bush was another. And the fact that he was committing recognized “acts of war” by shooting at our aircraft enforcing the no-fly zone, was a third.
Saddam’s reign was filled with one strategic mistake after another. He was neither wise nor far-seeing. He killed off anyone would have the courage to tell him he was wrong. And like many men before him, he came to believe his own propaganda.
So thus, “The Glorious Leader, Direct Descendant of the Prophet, the Lion of Babylon, the Father of the Two Lion Cubs, the Anointed One, the Successor of Nebuchadnezzar, the Modern Saladin of Islam” came to meet his fate.
georgej on November 12, 2007 at 4:34 PM
Schwarzkopf and then Franks believed they were there and Saddam would use them. It is interesting that he never used the weapons, even while being invaded. Maybe it was incompetence or fear of consequences.
dedalus on November 12, 2007 at 5:11 PM
Saddam wasn’t exactly a paragon of logic, so who knows?
baldilocks on November 12, 2007 at 6:53 PM
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