Lost among the ad nauseum Michael Jackson jokes and Sarah Palin media hysteria over the weekend was the quiet news story about the government de-classifying the FBI interviews with Sadaam Hussein before he was turned back over to the Iraqis. Some interesting stuff. On the WMD subject mentioned below, he did admit that he fostered the idea that Iraq had WMDs and he really wanted the west to believe that he did. But perhaps not for the reason most would think. As long as the west thought he had WMDs, and the UN was continuously sanctioning him for not letting inspectors do their jobs to find WMDs, Iran would also believe he had WMDs, and he was TERRIFIED OF IRAN. Even more than the west, he really wanted Iran to believe he had those weapons, so they would have to fear what he would do in case of attack.

Hussein admitted during his trial testimony that he had done everything he could to make sure outsiders - and even some of his own staff and Guard - thought he had WMD's. He knew he could no longer count on American support (and it rightly never occurred to him to seek support from the crooks in France and Germany who were helping him circumvent UN sanctions) in the event of an Iranian attack he expected would come someday. The Iran/Iraq war is a faded memory for us. But not for the Iraqis or the Iranians..

I found it interesting that Obama de-classified something that will actually reflect positively on the Bush Administration, and make the "Bush lied about WMDs" crowd look like the morons we have always known them to be. This being in contrast to the (so far anyway) refusal to declassify the results of the interrogations of the three terrorists who were waterboarded.