In light of all the recent hullabaloo by Democrats accusing President Bush of lying about weapons of mass destruction, I wonder what Saddam Hussein will say about the matter when it comes up in his trial?
1. Saddam will simply refuse to talk about WMD or to say anything substansive.
2. Saddam will continue to insist that he did have WMD and that we just didn't find them.
3. Saddam will say he never had WMD and that he was just trying to trick the world into respecting him.
4. Saddam will admit that he thought he had WMD but was actually deceived by his scientists.
Number 4 is most likely the truth, but Saddam will never admit it because it will make him look like a fool. I don't see how any of 2, 3 or 4 can do anything but hurt the Democrats, and 1 doesn't do anything to help them.
At one time, I'm quite certain that Saddam did have WMD's. After 1998, though, I'm fairly certain that he didn't... lest we would've found them by now.
When did Saddam attempt to trick us into thinking he had WMD? He must not be very good at trickery, since I never thought he did....
We know that he had WMDs once upon a time--he used chemical weapons to commit genocide against his own people, and he used chemical weapons in the war with Iran. We also have found a few of these chemical weapons, of 1970s and 1980s vintage (sarin, for example, in a few shells that Poles managed to buy).
There's another possiblity that Michael left out:
5. He admits that he had WMDs, got rid of them in the 1990s, and saw no reason to make it easy for us to figure out that he no longer had them.
I am inclined to think that #4 is the actual truth. Having spent (or banked abroad) lots of the Iraqi government's money on WMDs, the scientists involved weren't going to admit that they had nothing.