Blind Man’s Bluff

Via Kevin Drum I see that the Duelfer reports says that Saddam was willfully mysterious about his weapons capability because he was obsessed with the threat of Iran:

Hussein often denied U.S. assertions that he possessed banned weapons in defiance of U.N. resolutions, but for years he also persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he actually did have them. The Iraq Survey Group believes that he continued making those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of his stockpiles.

Based on the interrogations, it appears that Hussein underestimated how seriously the United States took the weapons issue, and he believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world — especially Iran — think he still had them.

It was a strategy, Hussein has told his FBI interrogators during the last 10 months, that was aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq’s neighbor to the east.

“The Iranian threat was very, very, palpable to him, and he didn’t want to be second to Iran, and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he had more than he did,” Duelfer, the Iraq Survey Group head, told members of the Senate on Wednesday.

If I may take a little bit of credit here, I posited a version of that theory back in July of ’03, not specifically highlighting Iran, but saying that it was likely a bluff to boost his prestige and deterrent in the region and within his own regime:

Saddam was a strongman dictator who maintained his power, both within the country and in the region, through fear and violence. Kowtowing to the UN and especially to the US would have substantially weakened his reputation as a ruthless tyrant who was willing to do anything to stay in power. If a totalitarian shows weakness, the whole house of cards can come tumbling down. It’s possible that he felt he had to bluff or lose his grip on power from within and encourage aggression from his neighbors.

In light of another revelation in the Duelfer report, I think that the other point in that paragraph — that Saddam was afraid of losing power from within — also turns out to be probable.

Shortly before the U.S. bombing and invasion of Iraq last year, Saddam Hussein gathered his top generals together to share what came to them as astonishing news: The weapons that the United States was launching a war to remove did not exist.

“There was plenty of surprise when Saddam said, ‘Sorry guys, we don’t have any’ ” weapons of mass destruction to use against the invading forces, a senior U.S. intelligence official said.

[…]

The new accounts contradict many U.S. assumptions about relations between Hussein and his senior aides, as well as American views on what Hussein was doing and how he saw the outside world before the invasion.

For example, many in the U.S. intelligence community had believed that Hussein’s sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the state of Iraq’s chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs — that is, that the dictator was misled by associates who told him what he wanted to hear.

Far from being misinformed, the report says, Hussein was micromanaging Iraq’s weapons policy himself and kept even his most loyal aides from gaining a clear picture of what was going on — and, more important, not going on — with the program.

“Saddam’s centrality to the regime’s political structure meant that he was the hub of Iraqi WMD policy and intent,” the report concluded.

Back when I wrote that earlier post, in light of the fact that Saddam was likely only bluffing, I went on to wonder whether our new doctine of preventive war was such a good idea:

The big question, however, is whether it is reasonable to believe that the most powerful country in the world bought this 3rd rate dictator’s gamesmanship and if it did, whether it is reasonable to have a doctrine of preventive war if our top flight, super sophisticated intelligence services are so easily duped.

If the clumsy posturing of a not-too-bright tyrant is now the only evidence we need to launch an invasion then we are in for a very bumpy ride. (And, I would like to propose that we simply start flushing thousand dollar bills down the toilet rather than continue to fund a defense and intelligence apparatus that is incapable of verifying whether or not these claims have any basis in reality.)

In truth, the hyping of the evidence speaks for itself …If Saddam bluffed and we knew he was bluffing (or certainly should have known) then somebody needs to ask what purpose was served for the people of the United States and Britain for their governments to call that bluff.

I still wonder why nobody asks why, if they actually believed that Saddam had WMD, they felt the need to overhype the threat so grandly and why they felt so comfortable putting 140,000 American troops in the direct line of fire. I have always thought they knew he was a paper tiger.

Clearly, they had other reasons for invading and none of those reasons have ever been publicly acknowleged. (The crap about “liberation” is, of course, utter nonsense. Bush and Cheney have never given a moment’s thought to someone else’s freedom in their entire life.) Everybody has their theory, from establishing military dominance in the middle east and seizing the oilfields to a primitive racist need to punish some arabs for 9/11 to revenge for the attempted assasination of Bush Sr.

That we still have no definitive reason for this invasion — good or bad, right or wrong — says everything.