In Saddam's prewar world, miscalculation and deception

By Bob Drogin and Mark Mazzetti
Los Angeles Times

Saddam Hussein surprised his own senior officers.

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"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, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official.

The unexpected glimpse inside Saddam's inner circle in the days and weeks before the regime was toppled is contained in a new report by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group that was released yesterday, as well as Senate testimony yesterday by ISG head Charles Duelfer and from a briefing given to reporters by an official familiar with the interrogations of Saddam and his aides.

The accounts contradict many previous U.S. assumptions about relations between Saddam and his senior aides, as well as previous U.S. views on what Saddam was doing and how he saw the outside world before the Iraq war.

Previously, for example, many in the U.S. intelligence community believed Saddam's sycophantic generals kept him in the dark about the true 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 ISG report says, Saddam had been micromanaging Iraq's WMD 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.

Both his paranoia and his fascination with science and technology "meant that control of WMD development and its deployment was never far from his touch," the report said.

While the interrogation reports may shed new light on Saddam's role, they also raise a question: If Saddam understood he had no stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, why did he limit the activities of the United Nations inside Iraq, violate U.N. Security Council resolutions, and defy the outside world?

Duelfer suggests an answer by depicting Saddam as engaged in a "difficult balancing act."

On the one hand, Duelfer says, Saddam recognized the need to disarm to achieve relief from U.N. sanctions. On the other, he felt the need to retain such weapons as a deterrent.

"The regime never resolved the contradiction inherent in this approach," Duelfer says.
 
Although Saddam often denied U.S. assertions that he possessed WMD in defiance of U.N. resolutions, for years he also persisted in making cryptic public statements to perpetuate the myth that he possessed the banned weapons. The ISG now believes he kept making those statements long after he had secretly ordered the destruction of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons.

Based on the interrogations, it appears that Saddam underestimated how seriously the United States took the issue of WMD, and he believed it was vital to his own survival that the outside world — especially Iran — thought he still had the forbidden weapons.

It was a strategy, Saddam has told his FBI interrogators during the past 10 months, that was aimed primarily at bluffing Iraq's neighbor to the east.

"The Iranian threat was very, very palpable to him, and he didn't want to be second to Iran, and he felt he had to deter them. So he wanted to create the impression that he had more than he did," Duelfer told members of the Senate yesterday.

And, the man known for colossal miscalculations made perhaps his greatest strategic blunder by refusing to believe that President Bush would make good on threats to remove him from power.

Captured in December hiding in a dirt hole in northern Iraq, Saddam is imprisoned at Camp Cropper, a U.S.-run facility at Baghdad's fortified airport.

Before the interrogations of Saddam began, Duelfer tried to determine what incentive U.S. officials could offer the ex-dictator to prompt him to cooperate. In the end, they decided to appeal to the dictator's vanity.

"The only thing we could offer was an opportunity to help shape his legacy," the official recalled. They asked Saddam if he wanted "to be remembered by what these characters are saying about you" — referring to other captured Baathist officials who were talking to U.S. interrogators.

According to the report, Saddam told interrogators that two experiences in particular convinced him that Iraq's possession — or at least perceived possession — of weapons of mass destruction assured his survival.

During the late 1980s, when Iraq appeared to be losing its war against Iran, Saddam's outnumbered army managed to stave off fast-moving Iranian forces by firing more than 100,000 munitions containing mustard gas and other lethal blister agents and nerve gases. The attacks caused up to 80,000 Iranian casualties, and ultimately led to a cease-fire.

Secondly, Saddam and his aides were convinced that their chemical and biological weapons saved the Baath party regime after a U.S.-led military coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. and allied troops halted their advance deep in southern Iraq, and Saddam and his regime unexpectedly were allowed to remain in power.

At the time, aides to then-President Bush thought the reason Saddam had not used illicit weapons against the coalition was that the U.S. had delivered a clear warning that it would respond with overwhelming force, implying a nuclear attack if necessary.

Yet Saddam and his aides told interrogators they thought Bush left him in power because U.S. officials knew of his orders to load and disperse his nerve gases and germ agents, and his orders that the weapons were to be used if U.S. troops entered Baghdad.

In the years after the Gulf War, the senior official said, Saddam became convinced that the U.S. would decide it was in its interest to deal with his regime because Iraq was large, secular, educated and had oil. That view may have been reinforced by the fact that, during much of the Reagan administration, the U.S. had supported Saddam as a counterweight to Iran.

"He believed that ultimately the U.S. would come to deal with Baghdad," the official said. "The mistake he made was thinking he would still be in Baghdad."