03 July 2009

Saddam Hussein's nonexistent WMDs

From unclassified FBI documents during his incarceration, his explanation that he faked having the WMDs in order to deter an attack by Iran:
Jul 2, 2009
By KIM GAMEL, Associated Press Writer

...Saddam falsely allowed the world to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction - the main U.S. rationale behind the war - because he feared revealing his weakness to Iran, the hostile neighbor he considered a bigger threat than the U.S.
..

The notes of the FBI interviews were made public Wednesday by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental research institute...

"By God, if I had such weapons, I would have used them in the fight against the United States," he told Piro...

In the interviews, Saddam dismissed Osama bin Laden as a "zealot" and said he had never personally met the al-Qaida leader. He said the Iraqi government did not cooperate with the terrorist group against the U.S...

Saddam also stated that the United States used the Sept. 11 terrorist attack as a justification to attack Iraq and said the U.S. had "lost sight of the cause of 9/11." He claimed that he denounced the attack in a series of editorials...

Saddam told him he had "miscalculated" Bush's intentions and expected only a limited U.S. attack. "Hussein stated Iraq could have absorbed another U.S. strike, for he viewed this as less of a threat than exposing themselves to Iran," according to a June 11, 2004, FBI interview report.
From the horse's mouth, so to speak, spoken at a time when he had no further need to dissemble. There are people, including at least one friend of mine, who still believe that Saddam Hussein did have nuclear and biologial WMDs that he successfully hid or moved out of the country, and that our invasion of his country was justified by those weapons.

4 comments:

  1. I stated to all who would listen from before we even invaded Iraq that this was the reason Saddam allowed the world to think he might still have WMD's. I fully expected intelligent people in the government to put themselves in his place and come to the same conclusion. Obviously I was wrong.

    Just chalk me up as a strong conservative who was against an invasion from the start.

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  2. I believe that he gassed the Kurds living in the North.
    He used some type of chemical weapon to do that.
    What makes you think that he used every last bit that he had?
    I am quite sure that he also had Nuclear ambitions, but Israel put a stop to that.
    I don't think that Nuclear weapons ever existed in Iraq.
    It's too bad that we had to make an example of Saddam Hussein.

    Lybia also had aspirations of building a Nuclear Bomb, but in 2003 Kadhafi thought better of it.
    This was after he saw that We as a nation will not put up with that kind of nonsense. I just hope that my current President will have such resolve.

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  3. I didn't say he was a good guy, gb. In fact, he was horrible. But there are many horrible rulers around the world who do even worse, and we don't invade them.
    Yes, he had chemical weapons. And they were destroyed after the 1991 Gulf War (a fact which turned out to be entirely correct in hindsight)

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  4. gbradley,

    Resolve? Bush resolved to almost ignore Afghanistan, the Taliban and OBL. Yes, let's invade Iran and North Korea by your rational. You conveniently forget about the UN inspectors to rationalize your Bush support. Gadhafi had already decided to cooperate with the West before 9-11 and had made overtures after accepting responsibility for Pan Am Flight 103 earlier that year. But you prefer revisionist history.

    "In fact, we started the cooperation even before the invasion of Iraq and we decided to announce it, the outcome of that cooperation, two weeks ago," Saif Al-Islam Gadhafi told CNN's Andrea Koppel.

    "Really it was a long and tough secret negotiation for nine months, and two weeks ago we closed the deal and we said, 'OK, done deal, announce it,'" he said.

    ReplyDelete

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