Saddam was bluffing

Or at least, that’s what he reveals in a series of recently released interviews conducted prior to his execution in 2006:

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda. [...]

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.”

Even though I should know better, I’m still inclined to take Saddam’s explanation at face value.  After all, it is – so far – the most rational explanation I’ve heard for his behavior in the run up to the Iraq War.  Indeed, at the risk of making myself look smarter than I actually am, I had proposed something along those lines when President Bush first declared his intention to disarm Saddam of nuclear weapons.  I remember thinking that if the United Nations is right and Saddam doesn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, then there are only two explanations for his behavior: either he’s genuinely insane or alternatively he is acutely aware of the possibility of an American invasion, and in a fashion not dissimilar to what you’d see in the natural world, is puffing himself up in a (vain) effort to scare away the United States.  I hadn’t considered Iran at the time (mostly because I knew little about Iran at the time), but that makes even more sense; Iran had been Iraq’s chief geopolitical competitor for over twenty years, of course he wouldn’t want to appear weak to his nearest (and most dangerous) rival.

Once again, it’s apparent that the Bush administration was hellbent on deposing Saddam regardless of the strategic consequences.  A more rational administration – or at least a more realist one – would have considered keeping Saddam around as a strategic competitor to Iran and al Qaeda.  It’s not ethical, but it certainly makes a whole lot more sense than invading Iraq, plunging it into chaos, and forcing the United States to spend precious blood and treasure in a vain attempt to salvage what is the biggest strategic blunder in modern American history.