On confusion – Steve Coll in NYT:

‘America committed its worst foreign policy mistake of the post-Cold War era when it invaded Iraq in 2003 to disarm Saddam Hussein of his supposed weapons of mass destruction. The war that followed exacted an appalling price in Iraqi and American lives and resources, and it also empowered Iran, energizing regional proxy conflicts that have entrapped Washington in the Middle East, as the Biden administration has rediscovered painfully.
At a time when the United States has identified managing dictatorships in China and Russia as the country’s most important national security challenge and when North Korea’s isolated and idiosyncratic leader holds nuclear weapons and intercontinental missiles, Mr. Hussein’s case offers a rare, well-documented study of why authoritarians often confound American analysts and presidents.
How might the U.S. invasion of Iraq have been avoided? Much of our post hoc investigation has focused on the false and manipulated intelligence about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, President George W. Bush’s choices, the selling of the war and the media’s complicity. Another central question has rarely been examined: Why did Mr. Hussein sacrifice his long reign in power — and ultimately his life — by creating an impression that he held dangerous weapons when he did not?’

(…)

‘In his many contradictions and inconsistencies, Mr. Hussein was not an unusual dictator. Important features of his reign are often found in autocracies — paranoia about threats to the leader’s power, unreliable information provided by unctuous and terrified aides and an inability to fully grasp adversaries’ intentions.
Like Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un today, Mr. Hussein unnerved the world by talking loosely about nuclear war. During the conflict over Kuwait, he was so convinced that an atomic strike by Israel or America was coming that he commissioned plans to evacuate Baghdad’s population to the countryside. His thinking rattled even his ruthless cousin Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as “Chemical Ali,” who was later hanged for his role in the gassing of Kurdish civilians during the 1980s. “All this hoopla about the effects of nuclear and atomic attack … frightens children,” he complained during one recorded meeting.
To which Mr. Hussein exclaimed: “What are we, a bunch of kids? I swear on your mustache … pay attention to civil defense!”’

(…)

‘Yet in the end, America made a profound misjudgment about his weapons of mass destruction capabilities because it failed to understand who he really was.’

Read the article here.

But who was Saddam really? Erratic, a paranoiac but rational enough to be tamed by more or less conventional deterrence?

And can we compare Putin to Saddam and what do we learn by doing so? Do not invade just deter? Cold war without communism. But with Trumpism.