Many Iraq hawks claim that once Saddam had a serious WMD capacity (i.e., more than just some nerve gas) he’d use it against the United States. I’ve never bought that. What I do think 
is that he might threaten it, or more likely use it to threaten our allies in the region with it, and that would make him extremely difficult for us to deal with.
Now, one of the central premises of the realist/containment viewpoint on Iraq (“he’s not suicidal, he could be deterred”) is that Saddam may be evil but he’s fundamentally a rational actor. I haven’t thought through all the implications of this, but it occurs to me that we’re now seeing a pretty clear partial refutation of that thesis.
We’re about to go to war with Iraq. It may be a terrible idea. It may go badly for us. We may get bogged down there for years. But one thing is absolutely certain: it will go terribly for Saddam Hussein. His regime won’t survive. And he probably won’t survive personally either.
He could prevent this by making a credible show of disarming. But he’s not. He’s quite literally courting his own destruction. Yes, one can figure issues of pride, national honor, unwillingness to lose his WMD capacity, etc. But at the end of the day he’s courting his own destruction, sealing his fate. How does that square with the idea that he’s purely a rational actor, most interested in his own survival?
