Saddam and Bush: What were you thinking?

When the definitive history of the Iraq war is written, future historians will surely want to ask Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush each one big question.

To Saddam, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you had no weapons of mass destruction, why did you keep acting as though you did? For Bush, the question would be: What were you thinking? If you bet your whole presidency on succeeding in Iraq, why did you let Donald Rumsfeld run the war with just enough troops to lose? Why didn't you establish security inside Iraq and along its borders? How could you ever have thought this would be easy?

The answer to these questions can be found in what was America's greatest intelligence failure in Iraq — and that was not about WMD.

Let me explain. While visiting the Iraqi port of Umm Qasr last week, I spent a morning watching the commanders of the Iraqi navy hold a staff meeting, while their British and U.S. advisers looked on. On the one hand, you felt as if they were doing a pretty good imitation of a British command briefing. On the other hand, the slightly ragged quality left you feeling that if you pulled the British and U.S. advisers out tomorrow, the whole Iraqi navy would collapse. The human capital and institutional foundation are simply not there yet. "How these guys ever fought the Iranians for eight years, I will never know," a British trainer remarked to me.

After that staff meeting, a British Royal Navy officer who was escorting me suggested that we go to Basra to see the flea market there. He said I could find anything I wanted, because so many Iraqis have had to hock basic household goods — stereos, refrigerators, air-conditioners, cars — to survive the last decade under Saddam.

Message: Failing to find WMD was a big intelligence failure. But the even bigger failure — the one that is the source of all our troubles today — was the failure to understand just how devastated Iraq's society, economy and institutions had become — after eight years of war with Iran, a crushing defeat in Gulf War I and then a decade of U.N. sanctions.

But I think Saddam knew how busted and bankrupt his country and army were. Therefore, he never wanted to completely erase the impression that he had WMD. Saddam lived in a den of wolves. The hint of WMD was his only deterrent shield left against his neighbors, his enemies at home and the West. (This was alluded to in the Duelfer WMD report.) So he tried to allow just enough U.N. inspections to clear him on WMD, while playing just enough cat and mouse with the United Nations to leave the impression that he still had something dangerous in the closet.