*British authorities have been casting about for some way to deal with Abu Hamza Misri, the fiery engineer-cum-preacher at Finsbury Park mosque who has preached and written justifications of the September 11 attacks. They raided the mosque in connection with their discovery of an Algerian cell linked to al-Qaida that had ricin poison in its possession. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, also worshipped there. Misri as a British citizen has been hard to touch, despite his horrendous hate speech. Now it turns out that he may have come by his British citizenship fraudulently, via a 1980 marriage to a British woman. It seems that the woman was at the time still married to her first husband and had not secured a legal divorce. This may be grounds for stripping him of his citizenship and charging him with polygamy (a crime in Britain), and deporting him to Egypt. Presumably the Mubarak government is looking forward to debriefing him and hosting him.

*On a list, the question came up of why Saddam seems so willing to risk everything for the sake of his weapons of mass destruction programs. I replied:

1) Saddam is extremely ambitious. He does not want to be dictator of a
third-rate country. He wants to be a major Power. Iraq alone cannot
provide the proper platform for a regional superpower. But if he had been
able to keep both Khuzistan and Kuwait, he might have had something.
Failing such territorial aggrandizement, WMD is another route to Power
status.


2) Saddam is paranoid about the intentions of his neighbors. He fears
that not only will he fail to make Iraq a major Power, but nefarious
interests may harm Iraq itself and thus reduce him to weakness. He rants
against the Turks and their designs on damming the Tigris and Euphrates.
He fears Kurdish separatism, often backed by outside powers like Iran or
the US. He fears Shiite irredentism and Iran. He fears the conservative
Gulf monarchies are trying to undermine him. He fears Israel and Mossad
(he has called the inspectors spies for the CIA and Mossad; to be fair,
both agencies appear at one time or another to have seriously planned for
taking him out). He fears the US and the UK, even when they aren't
actively planning an invasion. Before the first Gulf War he interpreted a
VOA report comparing him to Ceaucescu as a sign that the US planned to
arrange his overthrow.


My reading is that Saddam's combination of overweening pride and ambition,
and profound fear of everyone around him drives the obsession with WMD.
Without the latter, he would just be a tinpot dictator of a small 3rd
world country. It doesn't suit his self-image. It would be like Napoleon
being satisfied with just having France. But also without it he would
feel weak and helpless before the designs of his nefarious enemies. It
isn't a completely crazy conviction. After all, we've decided that
Khomeini was only repelled with the aid of WMD.


The syndrome whereby authoritarian personalities represent themselves as
victims of the scheming of others and think of their bullying and
aggression as merely self-defense, is common in history. Milosevic did
this to the Bosnians, e.g. Saddam is not even the only leader in the ME
who thinks this way, and has WMD.