Circumnavigating America

The FBI has released it's interrogations of Saddam Hussein and the former dictator of Iraq sounds a note of caution from the grave.

ca.news.yahoo.com...

Saddam Hussein believed Iran was a significant threat to Iraq and left open the possibility that he had weapons of mass destruction rather than appear vulnerable, according to declassified FBI documents on interrogations of the former Iraqi leader.

Obviously a valuable ally in the eyes of America's foreign policy éminences grises, yes? No.

The FBI reports, released on Wednesday, said Saddam asserted that he was more concerned about Iran discovering Iraq's weaknesses and vulnerabilities than the repercussions of the United States for blocking the return of UN weapons inspectors who were searching for WMD.


"In his opinion, the UN inspectors would have directly identified to the Iranians where to inflict maximum damage to Iraq," according to the documents obtained and released by the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute.

This would have been an obvious interpretation of Saddam's manouvers in State Department and CIA analytical quarters, yes? No. At least not unalterably so. Not if sufficient pressure were brought to bear by a regime even more criminal than Saddam's.

Saddam, identified as "High Value Detainee #1," shared Bush's hostility toward the "fanatic" Iranian mullahs, according to the FBI records of conversations from February through June 2004 between Saddam and Arabic-speaking agents in his detention cell at Baghdad International Airport.


Saddam also denied any connections to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who he called a "zealot," and cited North Korea as his most likely ally in a crunch, according to the documents.

Good news, in fact perfect news, in complete harmony with America's stated aims in the region, yes. No.

This is where the rubber meets the road. America's stated aims are no longer considered relevant anywhere in the world, no matter how nicely put. What is relevant are America's intentions and these can only be determined indirectly as they once were in the case of the old Soviet Union.

This is the hard and depressing lesson taught to us by Saddam Hussein, a rotter with a heart of gold, undone by an even worse rotter with a heart of rot.