I Knew Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein Was No Friend of Mine. Senator, You've Got a Little in Common With Saddam Hussein.

In an Op-ed the headline writers missed a chance to title: The Bomb and I, Mahdi Obeidi (the author of "The Bomb in My Garden: The Secrets of Saddam's Nuclear Mastermind) tells us:

...the West never understood the delusional nature of Saddam Hussein's mind. By 2002, when the United States and Britain were threatening war, he had lost touch with the reality of his diminished military might. By that time I had been promoted to director of projects for the country's entire military-industrial complex, and I witnessed firsthand the fantasy world in which he was living.

Speaking of living in a fantasy world, in his speech last week at New York University, John Kerry said

Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator who deserves his own special place in hell. But that was not, in itself, a reason to go to war. The satisfaction we take in his downfall does not hide this fact: we have traded a dictator for a chaos that has left America less secure.

...the President has made a series of catastrophic decisions … from the beginning … in Iraq. At every fork in the road, he has taken the wrong turn and led us in the wrong direction.

.... If his purpose was to confuse and mislead the American people, he succeeded.
His two main rationales – weapons of mass destruction and the Al Qaeda/September 11 connection – have been proved false… by the President’s own weapons inspectors… Only Vice President Cheney still insists that the earth is flat.

Not exactly, John John. In addition to Gen'l Mike DeLong's new book (referenced in the post immediately preceding this one) where he says:

We’ve done calculations that you could probably bury 16 Eiffel Towers or Empire State Buildings and never find them in the desert. Just four months ago, they were digging for something out in the middle of the desert and they hit something. It was a MIG-25 Foxbat that the Iraqis buried in the sand. We never would have found this thing.Biological Weapons, you could put almost your whole program in a suitcase. You could probably put your whole chemical weapons industry inside a van. Yes, they did have it and right today they can’t find it. The people we’ve captured, like Dr. Germ and Chemical Ali, the murderer of the Kurds, aren’t talking.

Dr Obeidi says in his Op-ed:

... our nuclear program could have been reinstituted at the snap of Saddam Hussein's fingers. The sanctions and the lucrative oil-for-food program had served as powerful deterrents, but world events - like Iran's current efforts to step up its nuclear ambitions - might well have changed the situation.

Iraqi scientists had the knowledge and the designs needed to jumpstart the program if necessary. And there is no question that we could have done so very quickly. In the late 1980's, we put together the most efficient covert nuclear program the world has ever seen. In about three years, we gained the ability to enrich uranium and nearly become a nuclear threat; we built an effective centrifuge from scratch, even though we started with no knowledge of centrifuge technology. Had Saddam Hussein ordered it and the world looked the other way, we might have shaved months if not years off our previous efforts.

And, since Kerry also said in his NYU speech:

The greatest threat we face is the possibility Al Qaeda or other terrorists will get their hands on a nuclear weapon.

To have left Saddam in power in Iraq, and complacently rest assured he wouldn't one day share his knowledge about nukes with Al Qaeda--and pretty clearly, he shared his chemical weapons with them--would seem to be, "delusional [in] nature". And evidence of "the fantasy world in which [John Kerry is] living".