From today’s NYT:
The trail that investigators have uncovered, partly from reading computer hard drives found in Baghdad and partly from interviews with captured members of Mr. Hussein’s inner circle, shows that a month before the American invasion, Iraqi officials traveled to Syria to demand that North Korea refund $1.9 million because it had failed to meet deadlines for delivering its first shipment of goods.
From WoC in May:
So you get ‘Potemkin weapons’; reports, promises, trailers filled with impressive-looking technical equipment, UAV’s that are really just oversized model airplanes. Occasionally, some competent or especially frightened technician might actually produce something – but almost certainly not on the scale that the dictator believes.
So Saddam believes he has them, and from that, we infer that he does, and what is really going on is a bunch of nervous paper-shuffling.
Ayup.
…And now, we can be very sure he never will have them. Which is the part that really matters.
I’m reminded of a hilarious Norman Spinrad story “World War Last” (anthologized in Other Americas). It’s about an Islamist despot with delusions of grandeur–and nukes!
Somehow, he gets a missile system to much fanfare, but it’s revealed to be a mere arcade game “Cruise Missile Commander”! Did Saddam read this?
Well, it looks like Saddam got screwed. As the French say: Tant pis!
With regards to WMD: we have just seen the “cover your ass” mentality prevalent in beauracracies in action. Just like in the USSR>