How to explain tha lack of WMDs in Iraq? Were we lied to? Is our intelligence flawed? Were the weapons destroyed? But if Saddam had no such weapons, why didn’t he simply open up his country to the inspectors? Jim Lacey posits another theory: that Saddam was conned by his own underlings into believing that the WMD program was working:
In the event that we do not find the WMD smoking gun this is the only explanation that would make any sense. Saddam wanted the program and was willing to endure crippling sanctions to have it. However, his henchmen were unable to deliver and, unwilling to be on the receiving end of Saddam’s zero-defects program, they faked it. In the process of making Saddam believe he had a functioning program they could easily have sucked U.S. intelligence into the deception. In fact, deceiving U.S. intelligence in this way would have been important to them. It would not have been conducive to a long life if the United States had come to Saddam and told him they had discovered he had no WMD program and all of his most trusted advisers were lying.
Ingenious, methinks. But the bottom line of Lacey’s argument is that our intelligence caused Bush and Blair to commit extraordinary errors in front of the entire world. Where is the accountability for that?
The Dish 