Doolittle-What Saddam Was Really Hiding

[realFedUp]

(and what if Saddam was just bluffing....)

http://badattitudes.com/MT/archives/000625.html#000625

September 12, 2003
What Saddam Was Really Hiding
Jerome Doolittle

In all the preposterous piffle from the White House about weapons of mass destruction, only one argument ever seemed worthy of adult consideration. This was the claim that since Saddam was not cooperating fully with the U.N. inspectors, he must have something to hide.

It only recently occurred to me that the something he was hiding was the absence of something, as the great Rumsfeld didn’t quite say. But Eric Marquardt has, in an a Eurasia Insight article brought to my attention by Southerly Buster. It starts out:

“David Broucher, a British representative to the United Nations conference on disarmament, testified that in February Kelly told him that his Iraqi contacts feared that if they were to allow full inspections, the United States would become too informed about Baghdad’s defense capabilities and therefore Iraq would be more vulnerable to attack —

-continued-

[DrBB]

1. It first occured to me back in January-December

...and I don't think I was the first to see the logic in this, by any means. If you wanted to explore, just hypothetically, that Ritter (who after all was in a good position to know) was right in his estimation that very little of Saddam's nastier armamentum remained, then you had to ask why Saddam hadn't "come clean." Partly of course the answer was that we knew even then that the quantitative estimates that said he was "lying" were based on simple arithmetic analysis of the records, not empirical observation, and such reasoning is fraught with uncertainties. How accurate were the records, both his and ours? But even without that it was easy enough to see, wearing one's psychopathic dictator's hat, that Saddam had all kinds of incentives to lead us to believe he might still have the stuff, even if he didn't. Deterrence (not just against us, by any means), prestige, bargaining position--power is power, and the perception of being dangerous gives you power even if that perception is rooted in a lie. Bush ought to know that better than anyone. And of course now that the empirical facts are starting to look a hell of a lot closer to Ritter's account than to Bush's, it stops being so hypothetical.

Amazing how this quite commonsensical explanation manages to occur to professional opinionizers so belatedly.

[Barrett808]

2. Agree with the conclusion, but

I have a couple of quibbles. First, Mr. Doolittle cites David Boucher:

Iraqi contacts feared that if they were to allow full inspections, the United States would become too informed about Baghdad’s defense capabilities and therefore Iraq would be more vulnerable to attack.

I prefer to think Saddam stopped cooperating because UNSCOM had been infiltrated by US intelligence, which used various methods to gather information on Saddam's location -- in preparation for a "decapitation strike." If so, his fears were justified, since Operation Desert Fox appears rather like a failed decapitation strike.

Second, Mr. Doolittle cites Newsweek:

So, after Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamel, head of his unconventional weapons programs, defected to Jordan in 1995, Saddam ordered intensified efforts to hide or destroy blueprints, ‘dual use’ technology and any remaining germs or chemicals.

But Mr. Doolittle neglects to mention that Hussein Kamel reported all the WMD were destroyed in 1991.

As for the claims that US intelligence was duped by fake defectors, all I can say is that Cheney and company were more than willing to read into defector reports whatever suited their policy goals. I don't think it's necessary to invoke fake defectors to explain delusional assumptions at the White House.

[Lisa]

3. I heard Ritter at a public lecture last year ...

That's pretty much what he told us -- "UNSCOM had been infiltrated by US intelligence".

He spent half an hour explaining that the methods used by the inspectors for finding illegal weapons caches also turned up info on Saddam's personal security .... his hiding places, his bodyguards, the schedule he used to move around so as not to expose himself to danger.

US intelligence agencies saw this as a goldmine -- Ritter said that they muscled their way in and started grabbing the information for themselves, and even asking the inspectors to get them things that were outside of the arms question altogether. This made it very hard to continue operating under the UN role.

It's kind of like a local PD that's keeping a known drug trafficking ring under surveillance, and from that they're accumulating info for the court on who the major players are and how they distribute the stuff. Then the military suddenly barge in, on the suspicion that one of them might be a "terra-ist", and want the local cops to send them all to Gitmo (including the addicts buying the stuff, who aren't really criminals and may be able to help testify against the ringleaders).