UNITED NATIONS - Saddam Hussein probably lied about his weapons of mass destruction because of pride and to protect himself from perceived Iranian attacks, a former US and UN weapons inspector said on Tuesday.Charles Duelfer, head of the CIA's Iraq survey group that hunted weapons after the 2003 Gulf War, said the threat from Iran was very real to Saddam, who wanted to create an impression he had more armaments than he really had. "There was a greater concern than we could appreciate sitting here in Washington of the threat posed by Iran," Duelfer told the Council on Foreign Relations. "Our gut feeling was not the same as the gut feeling one would have sitting in Baghdad."
Iraq and Iran fought a bloody war from 1980 to 1988 and kept up a low-level conflict after that. Suspicions were rife that Iran was developing weapons of mass destruction. "Saddam was certainly aware of the WMD assessments of Iran and he created a certain ambiguity about what his capabilities were," Duelfer said.
Duelfer reported last October that Saddam did not have weapons of mass destruction for more than a decade before the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq. But he said Saddam hoped in the future to reconstitute his unconventional arms programs and refused to let skilled scientists leave the country.
In a rare on-the-record talk, Duelfer said narcissism and pride played a large role in Saddam's obfuscation of his weapons, since he wanted to be a leader in science and technology, which meant nuclear capabilities.
Duelfer was the deputy executive chairman of UNSCOM, the UN Special Commission, which fielded inspectors in Iraq from 1991 to 1998. Iraq denied it had any unconventional weapons programs but shown proof to the contrary, Saddam's government allowed many to be destroyed but refused to account in detail what happened to all the armaments.
While President George W. Bush used Iraq's alleged weapons to justify the 2003 invasion, Duelfer said Saddam also had a "key intelligence failure" by not understanding that the United States would follow through on its threats after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.
Saddam in 1991 established as a priority to get UN sanctions lifted, imposed after the 1990 Gulf War when his troops invaded Kuwait. He tried to hide his arms programs, particularly biological and chemical weapons materials that are easier to conceal than nuclear facilities or missiles. Duelfer said Iraq resented inspectors prowling around, actions that immediately created mistrust between Iraqis and the UN teams. But in 1998, Iraq decided that "no matter what they did the United States in particular as not going to climb off on resolving the sanctions issue" and so Baghdad cut off cooperation with inspectors, Duelfer recalled. Saddam then tried to erode the sanctions by exploiting splits among the major powers and bribing politicians around the world.
| Which will never stop Kos and Atrios from telling everyone that Saddam was never a threat to us. |