Only Hussein Had Full Picture

Los Angeles Times ^ | October 7, 2004 | Bob Drogin and Mark Mazzetti

[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.

[Dilbert56]

The big question then becomes: Do you go to war without 100% certainty of the threat. Given that closed countries run by ruthless dictators are rather opaque, it would be rare to ever get to "lawyer-level" certainty.

Kerry says he would preempt but Bush was wrong to do so. We all know he's a pussy and would find any way to avoid making such a decision. He would wait until we're attacked.

The President did go to war but then the intelligence that was supposed to be rock-solid. Turns out the whole world's version of "rock-solid" might not hold up. Things can change in a nine-month "rush to war".

[wildbill]

If Saddam's generals thought they had WMD then how was Bush and the rest of the world supposed to know they didn't have them?