Saddam Hussein Misled this Nation into War

George Bush thought Saddam Hussein (a) was hiding WMDs and (b) had ties to al Qaeda. An FBI agent who interrogated the former Iraqi dictator for seven months elicited information suggesting that Bush was wrong on both counts.

If you are a standard emotional left-wing surface-scratcher, you actually believe that George Bush lied about these issues because (a) it is not possible for a president to be wrong and (b) he needed some justification to invade Iraq in order to serve corporate interests (or fulfill a Christian prophecy or whatever). But the truth is a lot more interesting than that, and we've known the truth for a long time. In case you don't know, the truth is that Saddam Hussein lied about his WMDs. That is, he deliberately deceived the world into thinking that his WMD program was still intact, and he had a very good reason for doing so. In an interview with 60-Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley, the FBI's chief Saddam interrogator (George Piro) explained this old news:

"And what did he tell you about how his weapons of mass destruction had been destroyed?" Pelley asks.

"He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s. And those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq," Piro says.

"So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?" Pelley asks.

"It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq," Piro says.

Before his wars with America, Saddam had fought a ruinous eight year war with Iran and it was Iran he still feared the most.

"He believed that he couldn't survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?" Pelley asks.

"Absolutely," Piro says.

All of this was documented long ago by the Iraq Survey Group (as I discussed here), but you may be hearing this news for the first time. If so, you really need to think through the implications. Like a lot of Americans, you may think that, in retrospect, George Bush should have allowed the UN inspectors to continue their work in Iraq instead of rushing to war. After all, even though Saddam Hussein was not being fully cooperative (which was the do-or-die condition set forth by George Bush), UN inspectors indicated that they were making progress anyway. That being the case, why not let the inspection process continue for a while? Perhaps the inspectors would have eventually concluded with a high degree of confidence that Iraq was free of WMDs, in which case we could have been spared this unnecessary war.

The problem with this line of thinking is that Saddam Hussein was intent on keeping the world deceived about his WMDs because, as it turns out, he feared that Iran would invade if they knew that he had disarmed. And this is precisely why Saddam would never fully cooperate (i.e., he used his failure to cooperate as a way to keep doubts alive). If the world started to become convinced that his WMDs had been destroyed, Saddam had the power to raise their suspicions once again. All he had to do was to deliberately behave like a guilty man by denying the inspectors access to something they wanted to see. That was the game he was playing.

Saddam was not going to allow the world to believe that he was free of WMDs because he simply couldn't risk it, and that's what you have to come to grips with. Had Saddam Hussein been allowed to remain in power, we'd still suspect that he had WMDs. So would Iran. Not only would we still believe that Saddam had WMDs (because he would make sure that we did), he probably would have them again in time:

In fact, Piro says Saddam intended to produce weapons of mass destruction again, some day. "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there," Piro says.

"And that was his intention?" Pelley asks.

"Yes," Piro says.

"What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?" Pelley asks.

"He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program," says Piro.

"Chemical, biological, even nuclear," Pelley asks.

"Yes," Piro says.

George Bush did not lie about Saddam's WMDs. Saddam himself did that, and the world believed him (understandably enough). Saddam did not think that Bush would actually invade, so he thought he could keep the deception up without too much fear of being toppled. It was a monumental miscalculation.

What about al Qaeda? Surely Bush lied about Saddam's ties to that terrorist organization, right? Wrong, and we've known that for a long time, too. Bush was wrong (probably), but he did not lie. We know this because an excruciatingly detailed bipartisan investigation by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence unanimously concluded as much in 2004:

The Committee found that none of the analysts or other people interviewed by the Committee said that they were pressured to change their conclusions related to Iraq's links to terrorism. After 9/11, however, analysts were under tremendous pressure to make correct assessments, to avoid missing a credible threat, and to avoid an intelligence failure on the scale of 9/11. As a result, the Intelligence Community's assessments were bold and assertive in pointing out potential terrorist links.

Obviously, that was the issue. Having missed very serious threats in the past, intelligence analysts had a hair trigger for detecting ties to terrorism so as not to repeat that costly mistake. In so doing, they made the opposite mistake (i.e., they "detected" nonexistent ties between Saddam and al Qaeda). This is fine by me because, although you are probably not aware of it, you only get to choose the error you are likely to make, not whether to be right or wrong. That is, we are going to make intelligence errors in the future (it's time for you to come to grips with that fact), so you should decide which error you'd rather make (missing a real threat until it is too late or detecting a threat that turns out not to be real). Thinking along these lines is not as much fun as angrily accusing George Bush of having lied, but it has the advantage of being tethered to reality.

In any case, George Bush believed what intelligence analysts had to say about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda. But because the intelligence analysts were wrong, he was, too:

Among the most important questions for U.S. intelligence was whether Saddam was supporting al Qaeda, as had been claimed by some in the Bush administration.

What was Saddam's opinion of Osama Bin Laden?

"He considered him to be a fanatic. And as such was very wary of him. He told me, 'You can't really trust fanatics,'" Piro says.

"Didn't think of Bin Laden as an ally in his effort against the United States in this war against the United States?" Pelley asks.

"No. No. He didn't wanna be seen with Bin Laden. And didn't want to associate with Bin Laden," Piro explains.

Piro says Saddam thought that Bin Laden was a threat to him and his regime.

Before the war, many on the left thought that Saddam would never associate with bin Laden because, if anything, bin Laden would be more of a threat than an ally. It seems likely that the left was correct about this (though it's probably also true that Iraq's intelligence agencies had some degree of interaction with al Qaeda, which is what caused intelligence analysts to get it wrong). The fact that the left had this right makes them blind to what came later in Iraq. What came later was al Qaeda's relentless and malicious suicide bombing campaign against Shiites in Iraq. Thus, a war that started out as an effort to eliminate Saddam's WMDs and end his support for al Qaeda (and to bring democracy to Iraq) morphed into an unwanted war with al Qaeda. At that point, our choice was to win that war or to lose that war. But the left has maintained an errie code of silence about al Qaeda in Iraq because, being stuck in the past, they thought that the argument was over. The classic example of this bizarre state of affairs comes from a November, 2006 interview with Nancy Pelosi in which she is asked to comment on some videotaped remarks by George Bush:

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: There's a lot of sectarian violence taking place fomented, in my opinion, because of these attacks by uh -- by al Qaeda, causing people to seek reprisal.

THOMAS FERRARO, REUTERS: (INAUDIBLE) blame the surging violence in Iraq on al Qaeda deny the country is in the midst of a civil war?

NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER-DESIGNATE: My response on the president's representations are well known. But the 9/11 Commission dismissed that notion a long time ago and I feel sad that the president is resorting to it again.

Note the complete absence of logic in her response. In this exchange, Bush said that, in 2006, al Qaeda was trying to incite sectarian violence (which is true beyond any doubt), yet Pelosi responds by saying (effectively) that it is simply not true because, before 2003, al Qaeda was not in Iraq. It is a non-sequitur. The left wing brain is constitutionally unable to come to grips with the fact that al Qaeda declared war on American forces in Iraq because they are still celebrating the fact that Bush was wrong about Saddam's ties to al Qaeda before the war. It is downright bizarre, and it is helped along by a mainstream media that is so clueless that it actually believes that George Piro is telling us something that is not already extremely well known (hence, the 60 Minutes interview). Well, the interview with Piro did reveal one thing that I did not know:

The Piro interviews with Saddam turned up other revelations about one of the most notorious war crimes of his regime: the use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1988. Iraq gassed its own people in something called the Anfal campaign to counter Iranian incursions and Kurdish resistance to his rule.

Piro says Saddam told him he himself gave the orders to use chemical weapons against the Kurds in the North. When shown the graphic pictures of the aftermath, Piro says Saddam reacted by saying, "Necessary."

Chilling. And that's the main that the left would have protected from George Bush. That's the man who would still be in power today had the likes of Barack Obama been in power. That's the man who would still be threatening the world with WMDs that no one knew were fictitious (and that would not be fictitious for long).

Despite what many mistakenly believe, the last chapter of the invasion of Iraq has not yet been written. Pollsters are fond of asking Americans if they believe that the invasion was worth it, as if the story is basically over and that a final determination can already be made. Most Americans now say that it was not worth it. But most Americans do not even know that Iraq has become a better place as a result of the troop surge. Eventually, they will come to know that. Eventually, democracy may actually succeed in Iraq (and the deep pessimism that pervades your liberal brain has no bearing on whether or not it will). Eventually, another poll will be taken in Iraq asking how life is now compared to how it was under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein that the left hoped to preserve. In response, a huge majority will say that they much prefer what they have now.

But even if all of this happens, the left will insist that a tyrannical dictator with the blood of 2 million people on his hands -- a man who personally ordered the horrific chemical weapon attack against the Kurds and who, when shown the graphic pictures of the aftermath, responded by saying, "Necessary" -- should have been allowed to remain in power. In fact, the left believes that it was immoral to bring him down. That way of thinking reflects a moral code that is (and that always will be) utterly foreign to me.