re: #32 LudwigVanQuixote

Quite frankly, it was Saddam Hussein that lied. He was afraid that if Iran didn’t believe he had WMDs, or at least a real possibility of having them, they’d perceive him as weak. He lied to his own military about having them. The field commanders were led to believe that while their own unit might not have WMDs, some of the other nearby units did. Or that the elite units more loyal to Saddam did.

An intelligence failure on the part of the U.S. and other western intelligence services is not implausible in the least under such circumstances, considering how the C.I.A. didn’t think the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse either, when it was lying to itself about how its economy was doing. If you’ve got a situation in which a closed society is lying to itself, it’s rather difficult for an outsider to find out what’s really going on.