Interesting report from Laurie Mylroie. She is responding to the recent 60 Minutes report that Saddam claimed to have tricked the world into thinking that he still had WMDs in order to keep the Iranians from invading. The side angle of that, if it’s true, is that 8 years of Clinton had convinced Saddam Hussein that he had more to fear from Iran than from the US. That would be in spite of the Clinton administration bombing Iraq in 1998 and 2000, and having struck al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and that alleged al Qaeda-Iraq WMD factory in Sudan. The fact that in all of those cases and the effort in the former Yugoslavia were limited to air power might have informed Hussein’s thinking. The fact that the US outsourced much of its foreign policy to the UN, which was in turn corrupted by Saddam’s petrodollar kickbacks, might have led him to think that an invasion remained off the table even after Bush took office in 2001.
In any case, Mylroie is well connect, informed and always worth reading. Read the whole thing.
The Iraq Survey Group learned that Iraqi intelligence operated five biological laboratories until the start of OIF. In 2004, the Pentagon debated whether to release a cache of captured Iraqi documents. Individuals familiar with those papers say they justified the war. Then Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen Cambone, however, argued against publicly releasing them, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld sided with Cambone. Subsequently, a handful of those documents were leaked to a small on-line news service.
Among the leaked Iraqi papers is one detailing the production of small amounts of anthrax and another detailing the production of small amounts of mustard gas. Such quantities could be used for terrorism.
Ronald Kessler also interviewed Piro, and Kessler’s latest book, The Terrorist Watch, includes three important points absent from the 60 Minutes interview. First, “Saddam was very smart — a lot smarter than we gave him credit for in the West,” Piro told Kessler. Second, “after Desert Storm [the 1991 war], Saddam considered himself to be at war with the United States,” Piro explained. Finally, Saddam’s foremost concern was his legacy. Before OIF began, Saddam was offered a comfortable exile in Saudi Arabia, but Saddam told Piro “he cared more about what people would think of him in five hundred or a thousand years than they did that day.”
These observations knock down two views embraced by Middle East experts after the 1991 war that helped buttress Bill Clinton’s do-nothing policy toward Iraq — that Saddam was “stupid” and that his foremost concern was his own survival and the survival of his regime. Taken together, Piro’s three observations suggest that sometime in the future, when Operation Iraqi Freedom is no longer a political football, Americans will likely learn that Saddam was indeed a major threat and that he was not idle in the 12 years between the end of the 1991 war and the start of the second war.
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