George Washington University’s National Security Archive recently made available documents regarding the FBI’s interviews with Saddam Hussein after his capture in 2004. One of the most crucial admissions during those interviews had to do with his regime’s calculated projection that it had WMD’s to ensure that the Iranians did not view Iraq to be as weak as it actually was. Even more, that Hussein openly admitted that because of the threat he perceived Iran to be, he was prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect it from threats in the region”.
“The threat from Iran was the major factor as to why he did not allow the return of UN inspectors,” Piro wrote. “Hussein stated he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for his refusal to allow UN inspectors back into Iraq.”
Forget that in those same interviews Hussein called Bin Laden a zealot and said that he had absolutely no dealings with al-Qaeda. What the interviews show is that Saddam Hussein considered Iran to be a greater threat to the security of his regime than the United States. And while that might sound bizarre to some, eight years of ghastly precedent were on Hussein’s side.
Equally intriguing is the fact that in those documents there is no discussion regarding the significant US assistance given Iraq by the Reagan Administration in the 80’s. Of course, that topic could very well have come up, but for reasons that I’m sure fall under some warped ‘national security’ caveat, such discussions were probably not documented, at least not by the FBI – if they were even allowed to broach the subject.
Some may very well point to this information and claim that the Bush Administration’s concerns regarding WMD’s were justified given that Hussein’s regime attempted to subvert the work of UN inspectors to bolster the perception that it had something to hide. That said, the CIA conducted an operation prior to the invasion in which it sent Iraqi ex-pats with connections to family that were members of the scientific establishment back to the country to determine the state of the country’s WMD programs, all of which returned and reported exactly what Hussein was afraid would be discovered – that Iraq’s capabilities were a façade. The intelligence gathered during that operation by the CIA was never presented to the President and never included in any official intelligence report.
