By Steven Clemons
Outside View Commentator
Washington, DC, Oct. 20 (UPI) -- The United States' chief arms inspector in Iraq, Charles Duelfer, has reported that nearly all of America's assumptions about Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities were wrong. Saddam was nearly powerless in his region but did not want to let his chief rivals, particularly Iran, know how effectively he had been de-clawed after the 1991 Gulf War.
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Any junior-level strategist with the vaguest knowledge of the ferocity of the Iran-Iraq War and the competition between these two rivals for regional hegemony would have known that Saddam perceived Iran as a clear and present danger. After the United States, the United Kingdom and other powers pushed Saddam back to his borders and disarmed him -- coupled with sanctions, no-fly zones, and U.N. weapons inspections (ad hoc though they were) -- Saddam's objective was to be a troublemaker just enough to keep Iran deterred but not enough to prompt another punitive engagement by the world's great powers.
What is ironic is that Saddam may have tried to communicate with President Bush to explain his situation through his famous interview with Dan Rather just before the U.S. invasion since there was
no hotline available. But our strategic class -- Don Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Stephen Hadley, Condoleezza Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad and others -- were not interested in preventing miscalculation and escalation. That makes their complicity in cherry-picking intelligence and drawing bad conclusions about Iraqi intentions even worse. Nearly all of these people have been in and out of RAND or are deeply familiar with RAND-type thinking about strategic threats and their management.
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The real tragedy of the Duelfer report is that it makes even more evident that miscalculation and escalation were what America's new wizards of Armageddon wanted. These people were the best trained in America at thinking through -- via games and calculations -- what kinds of natural deceptions a rival might try. We didn't see what Saddam was up to because we decided we didn't want to.
I'm sorry, I just forgot -- what are the biggest campaign issues this election?
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