On the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Saddam Hussein met with his top commanders. They chatted about a new uniform design as waiters served food. Then the dictator ordered the doors closed and turned to business: repelling the expected U.S.-led effort to liberate Kuwait.

"I want to make sure that the germ and chemical warheads, as well as the chemical and germ bombs, are available," Saddam said.

When it came to weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was a believer. Fusillades of poison gas had beat back waves of Iranian troops a few years earlier, and Saddam thought such weapons might help save him again.

His truculent attitude, captured on a tape uncovered and translated years later by U.S. weapons inspectors, would last but a few days. After a U.S. warning that use of such weapons would bring a massive response, Saddam fired only conventional warheads at Israel and Saudi Arabia. And within a year of Desert Storm, Saddam would back down again and order his banned weapons destroyed to meet United Nations demands.

The episode reflects the complex picture of Saddam that emerges from the 1,000-page report of chief U.S. arms inspector Charles Duelfer. The Iraqi dictator, now in U.S. military custody awaiting a war crimes trial in Iraq, comes across not as a madman but as a calculating adversary, ruthless but also ready to make a tactical retreat.

As the report makes clear, successive U.S. administrations misjudged not just Saddam's arsenal, but Saddam himself and in so doing may have missed opportunities to avoid war. To be sure, the Iraqi dictator comes across as brutal, perfectly willing to execute subordinates who defy him, or gas civilian populations. He was belligerent to the world. But the new portrait, one that was not available before last year's invasion, also shows that while the United States was obsessed with Saddam, Saddam was usually more concerned about neighboring Iran than his more distant adversary.

Understanding Saddam's actions, Duelfer suggests, requires "recalibrating the perspective of the reader" to see Saddam's world through his eyes.

Based largely on interrogation of the former dictator and members of his inner circle who are now awaiting trial, the report concludes that Saddam saw himself as the latest in a chain of great Iraqis in the tradition of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled the ancient Babylonian empire from 605 to 562 B.C. Even today, Saddam's biggest concern is his legacy. The FBI interrogator who has conducted all the interviews of Saddam used that vanity to try to prod him to tell his story and answer questions about banned weapons.

Saddam rightly feared the United States wanted to kill him. He said he didn't use a telephone more than twice in 10 years because he thought he'd be tracked. He grew increasingly distrustful over time. But he didn't see the United States as Iraq's main foe. That was Iran.

Fear of another Iranian invasion apparently compelled Saddam to play a double game: deny he had weapons of mass destruction to the West while leaving enough doubt that Iran could not be sure it wouldn't face the same devastating barrages the second time around. It turned out that Saddam was deceiving Iran and telling the West the truth, though it was hard to tell at the time. Saddam destroyed the weapons because he wanted the U.N. sanctions lifted — so he could buy more military components with which to fight Iran. But Saddam didn't loudly and unequivocally proclaim destruction of all his banned weapons because that would show Iraq's weakness to Iran, the report says.

One of Saddam's favorite books was Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. Saddam identified with the protagonist, Santiago, the Cuban fisherman who hooks a great marlin only to have sharks eat the fish down to a skeleton.

"The story sheds light on Saddam's view of the world and his place in it," according to the report. To him, "even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one."

Saddam was willing to see his country reduced to poverty and decay rather than lose face to the U.N. sanctions and inspections. This was not clearly understood by the U.S. policy makers who tried to bring him to heel for a dozen years after the first Gulf War.

U.S. intelligence did a poor job discerning the mindset of Saddam and his inner circle in part because it had no access to that inner circle, Duelfer says.

Testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Duelfer said the U.S. intelligence analysts "were actually in a very poor position. They didn't have any ground troops. They spent a lot of time looking at computer screens" instead of talking to Iraqis.

Saddam, meantime, came to misjudge the United States much as the United States misjudged him.

He was wily and had nearly won lifting of the U.N. sanctions at the time of the 9/11 attacks. But he did not understand how that day changed things. He committed a grievous error by being one of the few world leaders not to express outrage. Although he, too, distrusted al-Qaeda, he did not condemn it.

The report is not the last word. Saddam has told his interrogator that he's looking forward to the public stage that a war crimes trial will provide.

Commentary:
Iraq was Bush's bogeyman. Obviously he never posed a threat to our national security. Prior to the war the CIA said Saddam wouldn't use his WMD (assuming he had them) against the US unless we attacked him first.

After we attacked him in the most shameful abuse of power by any president in my lifetime, we quickly learned Saddam didn't have WMD and was misleading the West because he feared an attack by Iran. This story sounds very plausible, but the rest of the media appears unwilling to accept the fact that Bush was simply making things up.

It's always important to remember that the UN inspectors who were on the ground in Iraq they said our intelligence was "garbage." Again the US media (except CBS) kept this story under wraps so they could beat the drums of war because war is great for ratings.