After all these years of being told “Bush lied. People died.” over and over again we see a CBS 60 Minutes excerpt of an interview with Saddam’s handler while in custody.

The question has always been that if Saddam had no WMD why did he persist in allowing everyone to believe he did, even to the point of war?

Here’s some information on that:

Saddam still wouldn’t admit he had no weapons of mass destruction, even when it was obvious there would be military action against him because of the perception he did. Because, says Piro, “For him, it was critical that he was seen as still the strong, defiant Saddam. He thought that [faking having the weapons] would prevent the Iranians from reinvading Iraq,” he tells Pelley.

He also intended and had the wherewithal to restart the weapons program. “Saddam] still had the engineers. The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there,” says Piro. “He wanted to pursue all of WMD…to reconstitute his entire WMD program.” This included chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, Piro says.

[Emphasis mine]

This, after he realized the United States wasn’t going to conduct four days of a bombing campaign and then leave as we did in the first Gulf War.

The people with the knowledge and ability to reconstitute WMD are still in Iraq according to Piro, who was the only outsider to see Saddam while he was in prison.

We heard the other day of the “non-partisan” report that Bush lied 935 times in order to get us into this war, but everyone in the intelligence communities around the world believed Saddam had WMD. The Senators on the Intelligence Committee, including Jay Rockefeller and John Edwards believed it. Madeline Albright believed it, as did both former President and Mrs. Bill Clinton.

In fact, Mrs. Clinton acted as though she had some inside knowledge confirming that Saddam had WMD and now tiptoes through the tulips of memory lane, denying she ever thought so in the first place.

I sometimes wonder if we are living in an Alice in Wonderland world where everyone has gone down the rabbit hole and now right is wrong and wrong is right.

Now we know for a fact that Saddam led us to believe he had WMD in order to keep the Iranians off his back. And we know it to be true because 60 Minutes tells us so.

Does this change anything in the way people think about our president? No, because they want to believe he deliberately lied to us. It has worked so well for the opposition they plan to keep up this facade and do “whatever is necessary” to win back the White House.

I’m not so sure the prize is worth the price if the wrong people win. They have managed to drag a good man through the mud with them for over seven years now and won’t be happy until or unless they leave him a completely broken man. Lotsa luck on that one.