Thursday, November 27, 2003

Is Saddam smarter than Bush/Rumsfeld?

Tom Friedman: Letter From Tikrit
Friedman makes a good case that Saddam planned the war better than Bush/Rumsfeld. I remember confident predictions by Bush administration figures and journalists that Saddam wasn't the kind of guy to survive in basements as a hunted fugitive. Wrong.

Bush, based on his college results, is probably about average Yale intelligence, meaning he's quite smart. Rumsfeld is reputed to be very clever, but he is apparently delusional. Saddam, based on the evidence, may be much smarter than both of them, and far less delusional. The US has to stop imagining it's dealing with an incompetent penny ante dictator, and start thinking of Saddam as a particularly cunning variant of Josef Stalin.

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