Maybe Fred Thompson thinks he needs to get his crazy on in order to garner attention in the GOP primary race. That’s the only explanation for the comments he just made in Iowa about Saddam Hussein:
“Saddam Hussein, today, had we not gone in, would be sitting on this power keg and be in control of the whole thing,” Thompson predicted. “He would have been the new dictator of that entire region in my estimation. He is, was, a dangerous irrational man who, by this time, would have been well on his way to having the nuclear capability himself.”
This is nonsense and shows a stunning lack of understanding of the power relationships that ruled the Middle East from the first Gulf War until 2003. Saddam Hussein (1) was balanced by Iran, (2) had a pretty pathetic armed forces throughout the ’90s and ’00s, and (3) never signaled an interest in increased territorial hegemony after the first Gulf War.
Also, this is just ridiculous:
“We can’t forget the fact that although at a particular point in time we never found any WMD down there, he clearly had had WMD,” Thompson said. “He clearly had had the beginnings of a nuclear program, and in my estimation his intent never did change.”
Saddam didn’t have WMD in any serious sense. He may have had low-grade chemical and biological weapons programs, much of which were just left over from before the first Gulf War, but if we were to invade every country in the world that had that sort of weapons program, we’d be fighting across the globe. Here’s what the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,400-member international team organized by the Pentagon and the CIA to find WMDs, had to say about Saddam’s weapons programs in 2004: “While a small number of old, abandoned chemical munitions have been discovered, ISG judges that Iraq unilaterally destroyed its undeclared chemical weapons stockpile in 1991. There are no credible indications that Baghdad resumed production of chemical munitions thereafter.”
Read a freakin’ newspaper, Fred. Or a book. Or the internet. Or anything.
