Talk:Gone Horribly Right

Look, you don't believe me, look up the CBS news article on Saddam's own confession on the topic, after we captured him. The relevant excerpt...

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/interrogator-shares-saddams-confessions/4/

-----------

"He told me that most of the WMD had been destroyed by the U.N. inspectors in the '90s. And those that hadn't been destroyed by the inspectors were unilaterally destroyed by Iraq," Piro says.

"So why keep the secret? Why put your nation at risk, why put your own life at risk to maintain this charade?" Pelley asks.

"It was very important for him to project that because that was what kept him, in his mind, in power. That capability kept the Iranians away. It kept them from reinvading Iraq," Piro says.

Before his wars with America, Saddam had fought a ruinous eight year war with Iran and it was Iran he still feared the most.

"He believed that he couldn't survive without the perception that he had weapons of mass destruction?" Pelley asks.

"Absolutely," Piro says.

-----------

So, yeah, straight from the horse's mouth.

The problem here is in thorough irrelevance of the bit, not its veracity.

What irrelevance? Its a classic example of Gone Horribly Right - he tried to bluff that he still had WMDs, that bluff succeeded way more than he'd ever imagined it would, and that very success is what killed him. That's the trope in pure form.

The only casual relationship is speculation that everyone around was incompetent and believed him. And then there's this.

... because Saddam Hussein himself didn't know what was going on in his own country, or who Iraq lied to about what, or how and why he got invaded, but some newspaper reporters did know? I'm sorry, I don't find that a convincing argument.

I'm pretty sure the best authority available for exactly how and why Saddam Hussein got his ass kicked is Saddam. Man had, shall we say, the best view of the ongoing process.