Saddam Lied, Saddam Died!

[darrels joy]

Saddam Lied, Saddam Died!
Like Francisco Franco, Saddam Hussein is still dead, but the Washington Post reports on a new (all right, newly released) series of interviews with the Iraqi dictator, who was hanged in 2006 for crimes against humanity.

The Post reports that Saddam acknowledged to an FBI interviewer "that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran":

Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region." . . .

Hussein noted that Iran's weapons capabilities had increased dramatically while Iraq's weapons "had been eliminated by the UN sanctions," and that eventually Iraq would have to reconstitute its weapons to deal with that threat if it could not reach a security agreement with the United States.

The bad news is that Iran continues to pursue nuclear weapons. The good news is that Iraq has reached a security agreement with the U.S.
This ought to (but will not) silence those who've been determined to rewrite history with the claim that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were an invention of President Bush. Bush did not lie; he made a mistake--the same mistake everyone else in the world made, and a mistake Saddam, now by his own admission, encouraged them to make.

If Saddam was a victim, it was not of American lies and aggression but of his own too-successful efforts at misdirection.

[darrels joy]

Saddam Hussein Talks to the FBI:
Twenty Interviews and Five Conversations with "High Value Detainee # 1" in 2004
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 279
Edited by Joyce Battle
Assisted by Brendan McQuade
Posted - July 1, 2009
For more information contact:
Joyce Battle - 202/994-7145

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB279/index.htm