The endlessly repeated rant is that President Bush lied us into war with Iraq, but it was Saddam Hussein who did the lying and who did it effectively enough to persuade virtually everyone paying close attention that he still had weapons of mass destruction.
We were reminded of the fact this past Sunday when an interview with George Piro was shown on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” He’s the FBI agent who interrogated Saddam for months after his capture and who reports how Saddam wanted the world to think he had weapons of mass destruction in order to deter a possible attack by Iran.
The revisionist myth fostered by some anti-Bush critics is that Saddam, after agreeing that U.N. inspectors could be readmitted to his country, was happily helping them go about their task of looking for the WMD, that it was just a matter of time before everything was cleared up one way or the other and that, at any rate, this Middle East aggressor was finally contained. The truth is that his defiance was far from melting away.
Stubbornly and stupidly, it would seem, he was sending signals in addition to hundreds already sent that he had WMD and would thwart efforts to locate them. Keeping Iran intimidated might have been one reason he would take such a risk when the United States was threatening to come marching in, but there was another. Piro explained that Saddam thought the United States would indeed take action for a failure fully to cooperate, but nothing all that serious — no more than President Bill Clinton did during 1998’s ineffectual four-day aerial bombardment known as Operation Desert Fox.
And then, if that had been the extent of it — or if Saddam had once more kept inspectors from their rounds without any penalty at all — what then? He would no doubt have pursued the plans he had all along. Although lacking WMD at the time of the invasion, Saddam had intended to reconstitute them, he told Piro.
If any of this comes as a huge surprise to anyone, it shouldn’t. Though we hadn’t previously encountered Piro’s firsthand and fascinating account on national TV, we have known of Saddam’s murderous, weapons-building past, his hints of hidden WMD and his plans to have a nuke or two or three around in the future, along with biological and chemical instruments of widespread human suffering and death.
We have known as well that the testimony of his WMD possession came not only from his own actions, but from Bill and Hillary Clinton, members of the Clinton Cabinet, a long list of Democratic senators with access to intelligence, our own intelligence agencies and the intelligence agencies of such countries as France and Germany.
While there were those making a contrary case — on what intelligence estimate is this untrue? — it is not as if the western world had a deficiency of agreement among most of the experts we rely on that the WMD probably existed. The issue isn’t whether Bush lied, but what went wrong with our own intelligence agencies.
The issue is something else as well: why a certain frighteningly irate fringe of our population is so obsessed with a conspiratorial, Bush-hating, very nearly fanatical conviction on this issue, or why so many people won’t at least concede the plausibility of still other cited reasons for wanting to rid the world of this recklessly ambitious, genocidal regime standing firmly in the way of a reasonably safe Middle East. Saddam had no use for Osama bin Laden, he told Piro, but he himself was terror writ large.
Examiner Columnist Jay Ambrose is a former Washington opinion writer and editor of two dailies. He may be reached at [email protected]
