Foolish Dictator

From a NTT story via Tim Blair:

The Iraqi dictator was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of mass destruction, and they were demoralized because they had counted on hidden stocks of poison gas or germ weapons for the nation’s defense.

Saddam's first mistake was assuming that we would
be deterred by his ruse. Deception worked in the old
USSR, many of the missiles in those military parades
were fake, but there is a difference between a nuclear
confrontation and limited chemical warfare. We could, and
would have, confronted a chem-bio armed Iraq.

OK It's hard to admit that the intelligence was wrong,
or mostly wrong. But was the U.S. response to Saddam's
elaborate lie wrong?
I'm thinking here about the foolish bank robber who,
when confronted by the police, reaches in his pocket
and announces that he's got a gun. It matters little
that he only had a bologna sandwich in that pocket,
he's still going to be the guy with the bullet holes
in him. (stealing my own comment)