Saddam Hussein: I Lied About WMDs

According to just-released transcripts of Saddam Hussein's interrogations at the hands of FBI officers, he made up all that stuff about Iraq actually having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program to keep Iran from attacking his country.

Iraq and Iran spent most of the 1980's locked in a bloody war that killed hundreds of thousands of people on each side. Hussein feared that Iran would attack again if they thought Iraq was weak, so he encouraged the belief that Iraq was actively pursuing WMD technology to keep the Iranians at bay. He told his FBI interrogators that he was much more worried about Iran than he was the United States, thinking that Iraq could absorb a second US-led invasion, if it came to that.

Ironically Hussein and George W. Bush seemed to have a similar world view in a couple of key ways: they both thought that Iran was led by a bunch of religious "fanatics" and Saddam condemned Osama bin Laden as a "zealot" - adding that he never supported the Saudi-born terrorist.