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Sometime during 1995 or thereabouts, Iraqi Dictator and South Park satirical target Saddam Hussein was recorded speaking to his aides about such issues as chemical weapons, subverting U.N. inspections, and the possibility of terrorist attacks in the United States. Since we certainly don’t want to ignore anything that doesn’t serve our agenda, a good look at the story seemed to be a prudent measure, especially when some people might consider the release of these tapes to be a smoking gun to justify the current Iraq War.

First of all, are the tapes a smoking gun? If it were, you would see the government push this story as hard as humanly possible. But instead, the reaction from administration officials has been rather restrained:

A U.S. official said the tapes “do not change the story” on Saddam’s weapons programs in any substantive way.

“We already knew he had them in the early ’90s and wanted to get them again after he lost them but was not able to,” the official said.

Charles Duelfer, who concluded in the Iraq Survey Group report that Iraq’s WMD capacity and nuclear programs were destroyed in 1991, was similarly nonplussed:

The Survey Group report, written by Charles Duelfer and published in October 2004, concluded that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction when the United States invaded in March of 2003, but the regime intended to resume its WMD programs once U.N. sanctions were lifted.

Of the tapes, Duelfer said, “The tapes tend to reinforce, confirm, and to a certain extent, provide a bit more detail, the conclusions which we brought out in the report.”

So what do the tapes tell us, exactly?

1) Saddam wanted to acquire WMDs again. This isn’t particularly surprising, even to people who thought the war was a bad idea. Most of us agree that Saddam was a real bastard, and could not be trusted. However, we weren’t sold the war on the basis that Saddam wanted WMD’s at some indeterminate future date. We were sold the war on the basis that he already had such weapons, that he had a nuclear program already in the works, and that he was a grave threat to American security. Here’s some selections from a George Bush speech of the time (emphasis added):

…President Bush strode onto a stage in Cincinnati and told the audience that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “is seeking nuclear weapons.”

“The danger is already significant and it only grows worse with time,” Bush said in the speech delivered October 7, 2002. “If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?”

Don’t forget the other unproven stories that were remarkably effective at making us wet our collective pants: The yellowcake uranium. The mobile weapons labs. And, from the Brits, the statement that an Iraqi missile attack could reach their shores in 45 minutes. None of these came with a footnote that said “at some point” or “maybe years from now”.

2) Saddam wasn’t honest with the UN Weapons inspectors. Again, not too surprising. But even if he held back information from the UN, the tape itself makes it rather clear that any substantial work on new weapons programs would have to wait until sanctions were lifted and inspections ceased. This was confirmed by material in the Duelfer report. But that tape was produced in 1995, and the inspections and sanctions continued for long after that. Every year they continued would have made it that much harder to reconstitute a weapons program. Once again, from the Duelfer report:

Iraq’s nuclear program, which in 1991 was well-advanced, “was decaying” by 2001, the official said, to the point where Iraq was — if it even could restart the program — “many years from a bomb.”

3) Saddam predicted that terrorists would strike the United States. Even if you discount the on-tape declaration that Iraq wouldn’t be responsible (since Saddam isn’t exactly credible), this isn’t exactly a crystal-ball prediction. The first attack on the World Trade Center had only been two years earlier, in 1993. And while we can’t be certain which month the Saddam tapes were made, 1995 was also the year that Timothy McVeigh blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. There’s nothing to say that Saddam was doing more than reacting to either or both of those events, or just speculating.

Speculating is all we really have, since the Saddam tapes contain no admissions of ties to al Qaeda or 9/11; nor do they contain any direct threats toward the United States or anyone else. All they do is reinforce the idea that Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator bad guy. But was anyone really disputing that?

And as 1115 reader Fernando pointed out in the comments a few days back, for years we’ve painted Saddam as an untrustworthy liar with no credibility. If that is the case, how can we look at these tapes as a reliable source on anything? At most, they are a snapshot of a conversation that happened more than ten years ago. Whatever truths they contain are subjective at best.