Saddam Said He Bluffed on WMD to Deter Iran

Given that he must have known he was going to be executed, I think he had no reason to lie about this:

Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as "a zealot" and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region."

Bush, knowing all this or at least having good reason to believe it, boxed Hussein into a corner by demanding Iraq prove it had no WMD, which would have weakened Hussein against the Iranians. Instead, by deposing him, all we've done is strengthened Iran's influence in the region immeasurably, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives and hundreds of billions of American dollars.