THE RISING EAST
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Sen. John Rockefeller came out of a hearing in Washington on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to ask an intriguing, if rhetorical, question: "Did we misread it, or did they mislead us?"
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The West Virginia Democrat is not the only one to speculate that Saddam Hussein's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons never existed, or have not existed for a long time, or existed only in small stocks. An adviser to the Central Intelligence Agency, former Reagan and previous Bush officials, Time magazine, a United Nations weapons inspector, author Francis Fukuyama and the Economist magazine all have wondered if Saddam's weapons were an elaborate ruse.
While missiles banned by the United Nations have been discovered in Iraq, no weapons of mass destruction have been found, leaving some to wonder about the possibility of a massive prewar deception.
Why, they ask, did Saddam deceive Western intelligence agencies and leaders, including President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he could have said, "I don't have any. Come see for yourself," and saved Iraq from invasion and the rising toll of American, allied and Iraqi deaths?
The emerging answer: Saddam sought to retain power and deter his enemies, beginning with Shia Muslims at home, restless Kurds in northern Iraq and Iranians with whom he fought a long and indecisive war in the 1980s.
Further, Saddam's bluff was intended to avert humiliation by the United Nations, which had repeatedly condemned his nasty weapons. And obviously he hoped to deter an invasion that would destroy his army and topple him from his pedestal.
A related puzzle: Did Saddam mount this bluff, or did he believe he had those weapons — and was himself deceived by scientists and military officers who told him what he wanted to hear to save their necks?
David Kay, the CIA adviser whose testimony Rockefeller had just heard, raised doubts: "We are not yet at the point where we can say definitively ... that such weapons stocks do not exist, or that they existed before the war."
David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, have written: "The value of WMD, from Saddam's perspective ... was ... in the status such weapons gave him in the Arab world and in the potential deterrence value they produced vis-a-vis the United States and Israel."
Rivkin and Casey said that Nikita Khrushchev, the late Soviet leader, "engaged in an elaborate deception designed to make the West believe that Moscow had fielded strategically meaningful numbers of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles). The plan worked like a charm."
Time magazine said last month that it had spent three months interviewing Iraqi scientists and government officials who claimed: "The shell games Saddam played with U.N. inspectors were designed to conceal his progress on conventional weapons systems — missiles, air defenses, radar — not biological or chemical programs.
"It would be an irony almost too much to bear," Time concluded, "to consider that he doomed his country to war because he was intent on protecting weapons systems that didn't exist in the first place."
The former U.N. chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, said recently that he believed the Iraqis had "destroyed almost all of what they had in the summer of 1993." Why the bluff? Blix said: "You can put up a sign on your door, 'Beware of the dog,' without having a dog."
Francis Fukuyama, a political scientist at George Mason University in Virginia and author of "The End of History," asks: "Could it be that the U.S., the U.N. and even Saddam Hussein himself, were the victims of a massive deception?"
"Iraq was a totalitarian system in which everyone was forced to cater to Saddam's whims," Fukuyama says. "Iraqi scientists had every incentive to exaggerate the extent of their activities in internal communications with the regime. It is also possible that Saddam understood that his own people were lying or exaggerating Iraq's capabilities, but wanted word to quietly slip out as a deterrent."
Even the editors of the Economist, a careful and understated lot, raise the possibility that "Mr. Hussein intentionally created uncertainty about his arsenal: Adversaries might be deterred, while his guilt could never be categorically proven." Or, they say in the current issue, Saddam "may have been unwilling to face the shame of submitting to the U.N."
They surmise: "As can be the fate of dictators, Mr. Hussein's minions may have led him to believe that he had a bigger punch, and more to hide, than he actually did. When war was on his doorstep, they may have been too cowed to tell him the truth."
Last question: Have Saddam and his underlings read Sun Tzu? The Chinese strategist said 2,500 years ago: "All warfare is based on deception."
Richard Halloran is a former New York Times reporter in Asia.
