Saddam Hussein Revisited

[TacticalPeek]

washingtonpost.com
Saddam Hussein Revisited

By David Ignatius

Tuesday, September 14, 2004; Page A27

As the campaign debate over Iraq intensifies, one key element is missing: the figure of Saddam Hussein. It's hard to imagine now why the United States went to war against the disheveled tramp who was found cowering in a bunker in December.

A revealing portrait of the real Hussein emerges in an oral history recorded in January 2001 by Joseph C. Wilson, a State Department diplomat who was serving in Baghdad when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait in 1990. Wilson's account is powerful for two reasons: He is one of the few American diplomats who met with Hussein in his heyday, and he is now a prominent critic of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Wilson is probably best known as the husband of Valerie Plame, the covert CIA operative who allegedly was outed by Bush administration officials -- apparently because they were angry about Wilson's public rebuttal of Bush's claims regarding Iraqi attempts to acquire uranium from Niger.

Whatever his criticisms of Bush's war planning, Wilson had no illusions about the Iraqi leader. "I always understood that you had to be tough with Saddam Hussein," he told me this week. The question, then and now, was how best to contain the threat Hussein posed.


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http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19110-2004Sep13?language=printer