Those missing weapons of mass destruction

Revisiting my year old musings on why Saddam would risk war if he didn't have WMD

Just over a year ago I proposed a theory about Saddam's missing weapons of mass destruction.

In 1998 Saddam kicked out the UN inspectors and started to ramp up his WMD programs again. When 9/11 happened, and GWB called Iraq a founding member of the Axis of Evil, Saddam knew that having WMD would be very dangerous to his regime. However, he wanted to maintain the ability to reconstitute his WMD programs once the pressure of inspections, sanctions and GWB's war on terror abated. So he buried as much as could, destroyed what he couldn't hide, and threatened his scientists with death if they revealed anything.

Saddam also realized that his military was relatively weak, so he still needed WMD to deter his internal enemies, the Kurds in the North, the Shiite's in the South, as well as Iran and Israel, which both had unfinished business with Iraq. He maintained the threat of WMD by letting his enemies believe he still had them. Perhaps some of the evidence that Powell described, such as radio intercepts, were part of a campaign of deception by Saddam. The US military certainly believed he had chemical weapons at a minimum.

At the same time, the failure of the UN inspectors to find any WMD allowed Saddam to plausibly deny their existence, making it difficult for the US to make its case to the world and assemble a coalition against him. But Saddam was too smart by half.

Saddam nearly got away with it. The inspectors were finding nothing significant, the French and Russians were placing roadblocks in the way of the US, and "peace" protests erupted around the world supporting Iraq. Meanwhile, his propaganda machine was telling the world that sanctions were killing thousands of Iraqi children, so there was mounting pressure for sanctions to be lifted.

Thanks to GWB, Saddam's double-game on WMD failed.

Powerline links to reports on the results of interrogating Saddam. He quotes a report in the NYT which suggests my theory was not too far off the mark:

One official said that Mr. Hussein had implied that ambiguity over whether his government possessed illegal weapons "would keep the neighbors at bay, while the U.S. would be hung up in interminable debate at the U.N."

Some of those hidden weapons are turning up. Polish forces found a cache of rockets, some of which tested positive for Sain, and the terrorists obtained a rather dangerous binary sarin shell that they tried to use in an IED.

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