Did Saddam bluff, did Pentagon fool itself?

U.S. government officials keep promising that some Iraqi scientist will come forward to show U.S. military forces where all the weapons of mass destruction are hiding. Meanwile, an unidentified aid close the the Iraqi dictator says "Saddam did shut down his WMD program & bluffed the world":http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20030802/ap_on_re_mi_ea/saddam_s_bluff_4 to keep everyone guessing. This certainly would explain why no WMDs have been found. And on the face of it, it wasn't such a bad strategy. A few weeks ago I dubbed it the Rattlesnake Defense in reference to North Korea. It's a basic military strategy really: bluff other countries to convince them you have a stronger military bite than you really do. The U.S. and Soviet Union did that all the time during the Gulf War. Today's article goes on: bq. Intelligence officials at the Pentagon, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some experts had raised the theory that Iraq put out false information to persuade its enemies that it retained prohibited chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs. What's incredible is the implication that the Pentagon is just figuring this out now! Maybe it was in the best interests of the U.S. military machine to believe Saddam Hussein's bluff. The U.S. Congress won't fund a unneeded military. The Pentagon needed Saddam Hussein's threats to justify its existence at high levels after the end of the Cold War. The Pentagon will always over-estimate the threat of war. Petty dictators like Saddam Hussein will always bluff their militarily-stronger adversaries. Combine that with a Presidential Administration full of oil executives hungry for Persian Gulf supplies and you get all the ingredients for Gulf War II.