Stephen Den Beste has an essay up (I can't bring myself to call them posts...) on Saddam's WMD efforts that reinforces my point about WMD and bad management.
SDB: "I just stumbled on a report that offers an interesting point which might help explain just what happened with the apparently-missing Iraqi WMDs: the ones they did have were actually mostly destroyed, and in their frantic attempts to acquire the materials necessary to produce new ones, they ended up tossing money around like a drunken sailor, and got ripped off."Check out the rest. It goes a long way to answering my two questions on the subject:
SDB: "I think that it isn't that they voluntarily disarmed; it's that they tried to acquire the stuff they needed to rebuild their stockpiles and got rooked, again and again."That pretty neatly answers:
AL: "...two things (both of which get trumped if they actually find the Secret Underground WMD Factories) - why Saddam would risk war to hide weapons he knew he didn't have, and why Bush would risk lying about something so crucial, when it would be impossible for the lie not to get caught."
Like in the "emperor has no clothes", the emperor can't stop keeping up the appearances even if he's frigid in the winter and sunburnt in the summer. If SH had said that he was a duped fool, well, that would have sealed his doom just as well as GWB did. In fact the US might have been a better one to surrender to than the rest of the Baathist thugs, but we'll not know that plot twist for some time.
I've never known a buerocrat to admit that the sand in the shipping container was a complete ripoff, usually it "fails to meet standards"
This is a real possibility, but just to take the other side of this issue:
We know that Saddam had several Iraqi expatriots killed by his assassin squads (oops, diplomatic envoys) in various countries. Wouldn't someone fear for their life if they ripped Saddam off, no matter where they lived?