WHAT SADDAM WAS REALLY THINKING.

The article focuses on Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein. Everyone outside Iraq and just about everyone inside believed that he harbored a secret stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. So imagine the shock his generals received in late 2002 when U.S. forces were massing on the country's borders for an imminent invasion, and Saddam suddenly informed them that Iraq had no biological or chemical or nuclear weapons at all. Longtime aide Tariq Aziz told U.S. interrogators that military morale plummeted the moment senior officers learned Iraq would have to fight the U.S. without those weapons. The Saddam who emerges from the pages of a new, comprehensive CIA report on Iraq's alleged arsenal will be remembered for the colossal misjudgments that cost him his rule. The exhaustive detail compiled by the report's author, Charles Duelfer, chief U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s and the Bush Administration's top hunter since January, richly fills in the previous portrait of a paranoid and brutal dictator who believed that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were the prime tools with which to advance his extravagant ambitions. Drawn from lengthy interrogations of the core Iraqi leadership and Saddam during their months in U.S. custody, the Duelfer report sheds fresh light on the dictator's inner motivations and artful deceptions. The vast array of evidence uncovered to date shows that when the U.S. invaded in March 2003, Saddam had not been armed with WMD for a decade and that his ability to make new ones had been in a state of continual degradation. Far more worried about Iran, Saddam did not consider the U.S. a "natural adversary" and throughout the '90s, he had his officials make overtures for a dialogue with the U.S. He said he was disappointed that Washington never gave him a chance.