It took two kinds of stupidity to get us into the war--the Bush-Cheney Neo-Con brand and Saddam Hussein's. We get a closer look at the latter this weekend from the FBI agent who interrogated him after his capture.
Shrewd Saddam was so sure the US wouldn't invade, he told George Piro, that he refused to let inspectors verify that he had no WMD in order to fake out Iran.
"For him," Piro discloses on Sixty Minutes, "it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam" to "prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq."
During the run-up to the war, it was hard enough to reconcile George Bush's picture of the murderous dictator planning to send us a mushroom cloud with the buffoon on a balcony firing a rifle into the Baghdad air.
Even more baffling was our certainty that the invasion would be a "cakewalk" and our eagerness to send American troops into battle against nuclear and chemical weapons that could cause massive casualties.
As a reward for his bluffing and our being wrong about his WMD, Saddam ended up at the end of a rope, and we ended up with an endless occupation.
I guess Saddam forgot that the Project for the New American Century approached Clinton in 1998 to make a case for the invasion of Iraq. Clinton didn't see it their way, of course, but Saddam should have taken notice when most of PNAC founding members became the Bush Administration in 2001. Geez, it was all on the web, no one was trying to hide.
ReplyDeleteKind of amazing, huh?
He may have been an S.O.B., but he was *our* S.O.B.
ReplyDeleteAs we supported Iraq in the war against Iran, and Don Rumsfeld met with Saddam in 1983 and 1984, were we so certain that Iraq had WMD because the Reagan administration supplied them?
Which made supplying Iran with weapons for funds used to support Nicaraguan rebels, somewhat odd. We could have used the Iranian money to buy those weapons for Iraq.
ala: Catch 22