Saddam's Choice
Posted on 10/07/2004 6:11:14 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
WASHINGTON — 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 unexpected peek inside Hussein's inner circle in the days and weeks before the regime was toppled comes in a report by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group released Wednesday, as well as from Senate testimony Wednesday by Charles A. Duelfer, head of the survey group, and from a briefing for reporters by an official familiar with the interrogations of Hussein and his aides.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
It's Bush's fault that Saddam kept his inner circle in the dark.
Where did the known stocks of never agent and anthrax go?????????????????? Duelfer sure the hell doesn't know because Hussein would NOT tell them.
Saddam should be whipped, shaved and sent to France..that will teach him...
Not really, of course. It was Bill Clinton's fault for putting George Tenet and so many others in place in the CIA and FBI.
But it was Bush's fault for not getting rid of them as soon as he took office.
They only angle I can figure out is that he was using that doubt against possible actions of his old enemies such as Iran, who could not know for sure whether he had them or not.
The article does raise a good point. Security systems compartmentalize information so that few had a complete picture so the could not give it all away. This tendency had to get more pronounced after Saddam's son in law defected and revealed much about Iraqi WMD programs. It is also a fact that the many operators around Saddam hustled money and perks from him and did not deliver but spun stories about how well they were doing and paid off others to keep quiet.
I doubt that Saddam had a complete picture himself, although he had supposedly total access.
According to the MSM, everything is Bush's fault.
I disagree. A dictator rules by knowing everything and more than anyone else completely. And Saddam even now is playing the game. He moved them out, in my opinion for an exchange of power in some fashion against America. The real question would be who would stand to gain more than Saddam to keep the goods moving?
In the last couple days, the left figured out that that was their red herring that they needed to address. They have been trying to advance a "he was trying to scare Iran into thinking he had WMDs" story and that story is swiss cheese.
Hussein told the world he destroyed his WMDs ( so much for keeping up a scary perception ) and then wouldn't allow inspections.
Bush needs to ask Kerry tomorrow "where are Hussein's WMDs, Mr. Kerry"...and make Kerry try to explain what happened to the known WMDs.
Nobody smart enough to become Huusein is dumb enough to lose everything over nothing. Someday those WMD's will be found and I can't wait to see the look on the faces of all the dumb Poodles.
Then he can inform the ill informed that Hussein also gave sanctuary to Abu Nidal and his fellow islamofascist scumbags. Throw in Zarqawi, who was treated in Baghdad hospitals after we kikced his ass out of Afghanistan. For good measure he can talk about Salman PAk, Ansar al Islam, the Mukabarrat and the mass graves.
Perhaps even a bit about the 60,000 children who were dying each year because Hussein and his French, Russian and German buddies were stealing the food literally from their mouths.
Sanctions, Mr Kerry, never hurt the luantic dictators of the world, they hurt the innocent. So Mr Kerry, shove that up your brahman ass.
So we are to believe these generals who may have reported this or believe that what Saddam told them was actually true or maybe he told them they "didn't have any" because they had already been frisked away to Syria. Who knows? Certainly this doesn't clear anything up. It's central premise is that Saddam told these generals the truth.
Saddam, like Hitler, lied when it served his purposes. And he executed any one who he perceived as a threat to his hold on power. I don't need to go on here but its quite clear Saddam had ambitions of making Iraq a power in the Gulf and beyond. Getting ahold of WMD was just part of it. All of which is ignored in the mainstream media's superficial analysis of the Duefler report.
Because when he came into office he didn't know 9/11 was only eight months away.
I wondered why he hasn't cleaned house since. Although, perhaps he felt he needed every body, no matter how compromised, or he expected a patriotic post 9/11 unification to occurr in these agencies.
Whatever, if he was smart, he'd go through these agencies, smiting people upside the head after re-election in November.
Get rid of the CYA euro-butt kissers and make room for the guys who get that protectect the country is more important that careerism.
Saddam may be bad, but at least he's not Halliburton, or God forbid even worse - a Republican.
"Kerry wanted us to lose in VietNam, he wants us to lose in Iraq."
And then follow up: "We can't wait for them"...5 words.
I guess you are neat keen on republicans?
Stop repeating the BS that there were no WMDs found in Iraq!
What's amazing about this article is it perpetuates the lie that "no weapons of mass destruction have been found" by the ISG, but the ISG report, volume 3, page 30, on the CIA website, states that 53 chemical weapons have been found including 41 122mm rockets at a single site containing sarin/cyclosarin. I think I must be having a bad dream. AP lead story is "Bush admits no WMDs in Iraq" and the fact is there was an actual STOCKPILE, 41 weapons found.
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