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"Coll, an American journalist and author, fought a legal battle to gain access to a tranche of the material which is now the basis for his book, The Achilles Tr

"Coll, an American journalist and author, fought a legal battle to gain access to a tranche of the material which is now the basis for his book, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. It is a tale of mutual misunderstanding, often told from a western perspective but now, for the first time in depth, from Saddam’s idiosyncratic point of view. The Iraqi dictator believed the CIA to be all-knowing and all-powerful, so assumed George W Bush’s administration knew very well Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) left after Saddam ordered their destruction in the 1990s. The threatening rhetoric coming out of Washington was just propaganda, Saddam concluded, as he kept up a pretense of possessing WMD to deter his enemies, Iran in particular. “He was trying to signal his pride and his fear of humiliation and of vulnerability to both internal attacks and potentially external attacks,” Coll said. In apparent moments of doubt, Saddam would occasionally buttonhole ministers to ask if they had hidden any remnants of the nuclear, chemical or biological programmes he started. “Do we have any programmes going on that I don’t know about?” he demanded to know from his deputy prime minister in 1998. He was reassured that everything had been dismantled. " Unbelievable!

lazide 3y ago
The biggest mistake (IMO) is thinking that anything he would or could have done would have resulted in a different outcome. The US wanted an excuse to invade because Saddam had pissed some people off in the gov't, and they found it. It was transparent BS at the time to people who cared to look, most didn't care to look and therefore it was sufficient to get the votes they needed. Tail wagging the dog.
kiernanmcgowan 3y ago
"Twilight of the Bombs" opens with a recounting of the time period between the Gulf and Iraq wars. In this period the US discovers that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear weapons program and gets the international community heavily involved in shutting it down. While this was successful, the US government was aggressively involved in trying to learn everything they could about the program (people, places, research notes) so that they could double check and make absolutely sure everything was shut down. Saddam's gov eventually gets frustrated with this level of invasiveness and doesn't want to list high value military locations for fear of letting Iran know about them. The records end up getting destroyed. Saddam's gov thought "Hey, we burned all the notes involved in the weapons program, there's no way we can restart." Hawks in the US admin thought "They're hiding something that they don't want us to know about, they must still have a weapons program". Notable Hawks who took this position in the H.W. Bush admin were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who went on to hold offices of higher power in the W. Bush admin. So it goes. https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects/dp/0307387410 https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Pro...
deleted 3y ago
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lazide 3y ago

The biggest mistake (IMO) is thinking that anything he would or could have done would have resulted in a different outcome. The US wanted an excuse to invade because Saddam had pissed some people off in the gov't, and they found it. It was transparent BS at the time to people who cared to look, most didn't care to look and therefore it was sufficient to get the votes they needed. Tail wagging the dog.

kiernanmcgowan 3y ago

"Twilight of the Bombs" opens with a recounting of the time period between the Gulf and Iraq wars. In this period the US discovers that Iraq was trying to build a nuclear weapons program and gets the international community heavily involved in shutting it down. While this was successful, the US government was aggressively involved in trying to learn everything they could about the program (people, places, research notes) so that they could double check and make absolutely sure everything was shut down. Saddam's gov eventually gets frustrated with this level of invasiveness and doesn't want to list high value military locations for fear of letting Iran know about them. The records end up getting destroyed. Saddam's gov thought "Hey, we burned all the notes involved in the weapons program, there's no way we can restart." Hawks in the US admin thought "They're hiding something that they don't want us to know about, they must still have a weapons program". Notable Hawks who took this position in the H.W. Bush admin were Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld who went on to hold offices of higher power in the W. Bush admin. So it goes. https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Prospects/dp/0307387410 https://www.amazon.com/Twilight-Bombs-Challenges-Dangers-Pro...

deleted 3y ago

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