When the Commander in Chiefs of the worlds largest militaryX10 can be so easily duped into invading and laying waste to other countries, terrorists seem a very very tiny threat
Was he really that duped? It wasn't like Saddam did himself any favors leading up the invasion to de-escalate things. Both Saddam and Bush seemed perfectly happy to ratchet up the tension. I don't think Saddam expected a full scale invasion. In a lot of ways the White House can be a information hole and sometimes only the information that the President and his closest ad visors wants to see gets in and then it just confirms their already made up minds. Former Sec of Defense Robert McNamara was notorious for pushing a report/study so it fit his viewpoint that he wanted to see. Everybody around the heads will start to fit their opinions to what the leader wants to see. It take s a really great leader to encourage his subordinates to speak their minds.
This happened with Kennedy and the Bay of Pigs. Nobody wanted to tell Kennedy that the invasion wouldn't work without US military support (IE Air Strikes). Kennedy thought that the invasion could work with just the rebels launching the attack. The CIA thought that once the invasion started and the rebels got in trouble that Kennedy would call in air strikes. Well we all know what happened. This was one of the interesting things about Eisenhower. He had a way that he would say some outlandish statement and he would challenge the perceived dogma of what was already thought. This would then cause everyone to re-visit the subject in more detail. I think if Eisenhower was President in the run up to the Gulf War he would have laid out some statement saying I don't Iraqi has WMD and the intelligence is wrong. This would cause everyone to go back and try to make the case again and probably something would have shaken out of that Iraqi didn't have WMD. However Bush 43 isn't a Eisenhower and lacks his leadership abilities. Really Bush 43 wasn't that good of president. His father Bush 41 was much better and much more intelligence and knew when to call out his ad visors on their BS. Bush 43 never learned this skill.