Saddam Calculated Wrong

The NYT piece today summarizing new findings about Saddam's side of the pre-war has many fascinating nuggets, not the least of which is the following:

"The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation's defense."

How could they have been stunned? Had they not been reading Paul Krugman? The evidence that George W. Bush was spinning WMDs was "obvious long ago to any commentator who was willing to look at the facts." It just wasn't obvious to the top military leaders in Iraq three months before the invasion. Some of them, even after they had been told by Saddam that the cupboard was bare, found Colin Powell's presentation convincing.

What we're seeing is classic screw-up. A dictator boasts of WMDs that he doesn't have, primarily to keep his domestic opposition scared and to keep up the ambiguity internationally to deter any attack. But that ambiguity is what made the attack inevitable. For Saddam it was rational enough. If he admitted to WMDs, allowed total U.N. access to his country and scientists to leave, then his spell of domestic terror would have disintegrated, and he feared an uprising. But if he played the shell game one more time, maybe he could buy off the West yet again, after twelve years of success. That's what he calculated. And he calculated wrong.