How much intelligence is Saddaam good for?
The news is now talking about what sorts of inromation they're hoping to get out of Saddaam, starting with the location of the WMD. People are talking about the difficulty of interrogating him, given how high-profile he is. But it seems to me that there's a problem which is potentially even bigger: does Saddaam have any useful information?
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In his new book, Bob Rubin discusses the problem of the CEO -- that even a CEO who is receptive to disagreement or disagreeable information will find people agreeing with them, or "softening" bad news, because they are awestruck or merely ambitious. Brutal tyrants have this problem in spades: people don't tell you things you don't want to hear, because you tend to shoot them. This phenomenon explains a lot of Hitler's behaviour during World War II -- as I recall, by the end of the war, Hitler spent much of his time ordering phantom divisions, long since destroyed, around Europe.
This may well also be the explanation for a lot of Saddaam's behavior leading up to the war. As a coworker pointed out, there's an enormous "What the F***?" factor to his actions. It's simply lunatic that he could have thought he would defeat us, and if he didn't have WMD, why not let the inspectors in? The most interesting explanation I've heard is that he thought he did have WMD -- that subordinates, fearful of his wrath, had been giving him regular reports about a phantom weapons program he didn't want the UN to discover. It's certainly fascinating to consider that all those games the Iraqis played with the weapons inspectors pre-1998 might have been aimed less at fooling the UN than at preventing their boss from discovering that they hadn't succeeded in fabricating anthrax after all.
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From the desk of Jane Galt:
janegalt.net |
