the minds of madmen: riddles at best?

(From the Economist (March 18th), article in full. Links and notes have been added.)

Inside the box
New insights on what Saddam Hussein thought he was doing

When the American army overran Iraq three years ago, it was famously short of military policemen, Arabic-speakers and good ideas for putting the broken country back together again. But the army's historians have since then made the most of a unique opportunity: the chance to question Saddam Hussein's top generals and advisers about what happened inside the regime before and during the war. The findings are to be published next month in a book-length report. But its authors have published a preview on the website of the New York-based journal, Foreign Affairs. It contains some riveting findings.

One of these, based mainly on the testimony of Tariq Aziz, Saddam's deputy prime minister, is that right up to the last moment the dictator did not expect America to attack, because of the faith he had in pressure from Russia and France in the UN Security Council. Mr. Aziz told his interrogators that the two countries had received millions of dollars of trade and service contracts with Iraq, "with the implied understanding that their political posture... would be pro-Iraqi."(1) Even after the invasion started, Saddam did not expect the Americans to fight all the way to Baghdad - a delusion that prevented him from torching his oilfields or opening the dams to flood southern Iraq.(2) Fixated at first on internal threats, instead of the advancing American army, Saddam later came to believe that Iraq was winning, and continued to think so until American tanks reached Baghdad. His own generals were far too scared of him to risk breaking the bad news.

As for those weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it seems that some senior members of the ruling circle never stopped believing, even after the war, that Iraq had these, even though Saddam himself knew otherwise.(3) When he revealed the truth to members of his Revolutionary Command Council not long before the war, their morale slumped. But he refused a suggestion to make the truth clear to the wider world on the ground that his presumed possession of WMD was a form of deterrence, and that coming clean might encourage an attack by Israel.(4) Instead, of course, the dictator's non-existent WMD became one reason America gave for its decision not to topple him. This was, without a doubt, the mother of all ironies.


Some or all of these points may be addressed in the report, which I haven't yet read:
(1) What did this contribute, if anything, to France's rabid resistance to the war? I don't remember the country's motives being questioned much in the media, except to say they were lilly-livered sissies, but maybe that's just my selective memory. This bears futher research.
(2) Flood southern Iraq? Seriously? I mean, I know the guy was off his rocker, but would he really put part of his country under water? How many people would this have killed, I wonder?
(3) This is a HUGE boon to the US (and UK) intelligence community. If Saddam was deliberately spreading information about a WMD program among all ranks of officials, any information gotten through surveillance of conversations, or interrogation of key members of the party, or good old fashioned spying, might have led the CIA to conclude that Iraqi WMDs were a viable threat. Maybe Saddam even went so far as to try to purchase parts (or uranium?) to make it more believable that Iraq was building chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. I wonder if any how this'll be used by the Administration's public relations machine.
(4) Why would Israel go out of its way to attack a neighboring country without direct provocation? Maybe it was just Saddam's crazy paranoia talking, or maybe there's a reason buried (or obvious) in Arab-Israeli relations.