If Saddam Was Telling the Truth

In Saddam Hussein’s now-released interviews stating that he was more fearful of Iran than the U.S. and thus had to maintain the fiction of a robust non-conventional weapons capability, it seems a remarkably poor strategy.

In Saddam Hussein’s now-released interviews stating that he was more fearful of Iran than the U.S. and thus had to maintain the fiction of a robust non-conventional weapons capability, it seems a remarkably poor strategy.   He – or Tariq Aziz – should have spotted the sharp divergences on Iran policy between the U.S. and the Europeans and tried to exploit them. He could have sought to work quietly with U.S. intelligence on the question of WMD – surely there would have been plenty of people inside the government who would have been receptive to this and used this real cooperation as a pushback against the neoconservatives supposedly driving America relentlessly to war. He would have had little reason to fear that the U.S. would suddenly turn towards Iran once they had a better assessment of Iraqi WMD programs.