According to the report, Hussein told interrogators that two experiences in particular convinced him that Iraq's possession -- or at least perceived possession -- of banned weapons assured his survival.
During the late 1980s, when Iraq appeared to be losing its war against Iran, Hussein's outnumbered army managed to stave off fast-moving Iranian forces by firing more than 100,000 munitions containing mustard gas and other lethal blister agents and nerve gases. The chemical attacks caused as many as 80,000 Iranian casualties, according to U.N. reports, and ultimately led to a cease-fire.
Second, Hussein and his aides were convinced that their chemical and biological weapons saved the Baath Party regime after a U.S.-led military coalition forced Iraqi troops out of Kuwait in 1991. U.S. and allied troops halted their advance deep in southern Iraq, and Hussein and his regime unexpectedly were allowed to remain in power.
At the time, aides to then-President George H.W. Bush thought the reason Hussein had not used illicit weapons against the coalition was that Washington had delivered a clear warning that it would respond with overwhelming force, implying a nuclear attack if necessary.
Yet Hussein and his aides apparently read U.S. thinking differently. As they described it to interrogators, they thought Washington left him in power because U.S. officials knew of his orders to load and disperse his nerve gases and germ agents, and his orders that the weapons were to be used if U.S. troops entered Baghdad.
In the years after the Gulf War, the senior official said, Hussein became convinced that Washington would decide it was in its interest to deal with his regime because Iraq was large, secular, educated and had oil. That view may have been reinforced by the fact that during much of the Reagan administration, Washington supported Hussein as a counterweight to Iran.
The alliance became strained, however, and was ruptured when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
"He believed that ultimately the U.S. would come to deal with Baghdad," the official said. "The mistake he made was thinking he would still be in Baghdad."
The official predicted that Hussein would be "very compelling" when he was finally brought to trial in Baghdad for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
"He's looking forward to the stage, the theater, that the trial will offer him," he said. "Don't expect someone bug-eyed ... or waving his arms."
The Iraq Survey Group report also reveals a passion that Hussein had for certain aspects of Western culture, and how he personally related to certain fictional characters, such as Santiago in Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea."
In the story, the fisherman Santiago hooks a marlin that drags his boat out to sea. When the marlin dies, Santiago fights an ultimately futile battle with sharks that tear into the fish and reduce it to a skeleton.
"Saddam tended to characterize, in a very Hemingway-esque way, his life as a relentless struggle against overwhelming odds, but carried out with courage, perseverance and dignity," the report concludes.
"Much like Santiago, ultimately left with only the marlin's skeleton as the trophy of his success, to Saddam even a hollow victory was by his reckoning a real one."
