BOUNDED RATIONALITY: One of the most common and seemingly persuasive arguments against going to war with Iraq is based on an appeal to Saddam's rationality. It's not a joke, as expressed by Jim Henley ("Saddam has been successfully deterred in the past. Saddam has never used "weapons of mass destruction" against an opponent capable of responding in kind.")
among others. This argument doesn't accomodate:
1) The expansion of options rationally available to Saddam once he gains nuclear weapons (such as invading Kuwait and using his nuclear weapons to deter us from acting against him, a context for action at least as rational as the "green light" the U.S. allegedly gave him in 1990);
2) The likelihood that Saddam could dodge responsibility for giving weapons to Al Qaeda or the like, at least for long enough for the chorus of respectable voices to attempt to dissuade us from hasty action. Just think about it: it takes the CIA & FBI a year to make the link, and then the editorials are cut and pasted about how "international support for the U.S., so strong a year ago in the wake of the attack, is now fading..." If that doesn't convince you, then how are we doing on finding the anthrax culprit? And why might Saddam not rationally take comfort from the stumbles of our law-enforcement agencies in figuring what he can get away with?
A final problem with the argument is that it ignores at least one prominent episode in our relations with Saddam: the attempted assasination of George H.W. Bush in 1993. That would have been an attack against an important American target (at least symbolically), with clear state-sponsored links, notwithstanding our massive deterrent edge. (And remember the pinprick response, which can only have emboldened Saddam.) Shouldn't that example make us hesitate before getting too confident that Saddam would never, for example, pass biological weapons to Al Qaeda?
In fact, the attempted assassination may have been more important to Saddam than we give it credit for. To put it mildly, Sadddam obviously has an extreme case of Sun King syndrome. ("L'etat c'est moi.") An attack on the former President of the United States, the leader of the country which defeated Iraq in war, may well have been intended by Saddam as an attack on the United States to a far greater degree than it would have been seen by Americans. (If so, the low-level response to the attempt may have been viewed as an even weaker gesture than we realize.)