Oh, this is rich (emphasis mine):
Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.
Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.”
Former president George W. Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq six years ago on the grounds that Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a threat to international security. Administration officials at the time also strongly suggested Iraq had significant links to al-Qaeda, which carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that we should have entered into some security pact with Saddam Hussein, but it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper to do that than invade his country and occupy it for ten years. I’m just saying.
The main point is that Saddam was no threat to the United States and the threat derived from our containment policy was manageable in other ways than invading under false pretenses.
