WMD gone by 1995: What in the World Was Saddam Thinking?

Iraq: What in the World Was Saddam Thinking?
NEWSWEEK 9/15/03 Issue
?-Mark Hosenball

Saddam Hussein was apparently convinced that American forces would never invade Iraq and oust him from power, say U.S. officials familiar with the accounts of captured members of the former dictator's regime.

U.S. DEFENSE AND Security sources tell NEWSWEEK that high-ranking former Saddam aides have told U.S. interrogators that Saddam believed the only assault President George W. Bush would ever launch against Iraq was the kind of low-risk bombing campaign that the Clinton administration used in the former Yugoslavia.

Saddam was also confident that France and Germany would pressure the Americans to retreat from this course, leaving Iraq shaken but Saddam still in power. Even after American divisions assembled on Iraq's borders, Saddam, recalling the first gulf war, thought U.S. ground forces would only go after suspected unconventional weapons sites, Scud missile launchers and military bases.

U.S. officials say that this account of Saddam's misunderstanding of American intentions?-he was surrounded by sycophants?-could explain the haphazard way in which the regime defended itself and fell apart early in the American onslaught. It might also shed light on why Saddam's Information Minister "Baghdad Bob" continued to deny the regime was in peril even as U.S. forces entered Baghdad.

U.S. analysts are also taking more seriously stories detained Iraqi leaders are telling about what happened to Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. U.S. sources say that captured Iraqis insist Saddam's top strategic objective was to persuade the United Nations to relax sanctions on his regime.

So, after Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamel, head of his unconventional weapons programs, defected to Jordan in 1995, Saddam ordered intensified efforts to hide or destroy blueprints, "dual use" technology and any remaining germs or chemicals. Not only was material stashed or obliterated, but records showing what had been destroyed were also pulped.

Some U.S. and British intel officials still say stockpiles of chemical or biological agents will turn up. But U.S. Defense analysts are paying more attention to a "working hypothesis," based on stories told by Iraqi captives, that no live WMD may ever be found.

Some U.S. officials even think Iraqi defectors who surfaced before the war saying Saddam was still making WMD were double agents dispatched by Saddam to spread disinformation to deter his enemies. Others say this would have undermined his effort to have U.N. sanctions lifted.