An unlikely explanation from Time's Jim Lacey, an embedded reporter with the 101st Airborne, as to the whereabouts of Saddam's bio-chem-atomics:

It is likely that if Saddam no longer had a WMD program he did not know it. Why else would he endure over a decade of crippling sanctions? If Saddam had ended his quest for WMDs, it would have been in his best interest to open the doors wide and let the world see. By playing as the model citizen he would have regained control of his oil wealth and quickly been able to make Iraq a regional superpower again.

Instead, his henchmen did everything possible to obfuscate the true WMD picture and to thwart any inspection teams. If they had nothing to hide, they sure worked hard at trying to hide it. What if they were not just hiding a possible WMD program from inspectors, but also hiding from Saddam the fact that no such program existed?

While I'm sure Lacey is honest in his assessment, the idea teeters between illogical and silly. Saddam was a Stalinist dictator - and one is not identified as "Stalinist" without reason. Stalin was a frightful mix of violent narcissism and paranoia; rivals were removed, nationwide pogroms and purges conducted. Stalin made it his business to know as much about the daily lives and plans of the Russian people for fear of subterfuge or overthrow. Saddam's rule was quite similar, notably spattered with regular purges of his establishment. "Disloyalty," in one of its numerously accepted forms, was one qualification for execution, but, and very importantly, capability was another. Politics goes without saying - hence, say, the unpopular Christian-born Tariq Aziz's two-decade tenure with the Ba'ath Party that led to his final appointment as Ba'ath "Deputy Prime Minister." But anyone who was clever and audacious enough to begin his own microcosm in Saddam's arid world would be discovered and eliminated.

The most powerful men in Ba'ath intelligence services, political establishments and ruling councils were the greatest threats to Saddam, so one can assume that the most scrutiny and organizational checks and balances - setting agencies to rival one another, instituting paramilitary bulwarks between regular army units - were applied to them.

But as the West suspected from spy reports and the stories told by defectors, and is now discovering piece by piece, Saddam's interest in the everyday lives of his repressed populace was meticulous and universal:

Backed by tanks, U.S. troops have seized millions of Iraqi intelligence files from a citizens group involved in a daunting search for those who disappeared into the secret prisons of fallen president Saddam Hussein.

[...]

The files taken today were largely looted from the homes of senior officials of Hussein's ruling Baath Party, gathered up by local residents and delivered to U.S. military officials and Iraqi activists involved in helping to find the legions of missing. They are part of emerging archives kept by a government obsessed with internal vigilance and the careful record-keeping it entails.

[...]

Small black-and-white photographs appear with each opened file: a mustachioed university student in 1963 believed to be a communist, a suspicious army lieutenant in 1968. Children of prisoners will likely use the records to retrieve property lost as a result of their parents' disappearances.

And, of course, "the government" means Saddam - no one should doubt the absolute power jealously guarded by the man who idolized Vito Corleone. A couple of weeks back I fought off frightened depression while watching a television documentary on Saddam's twenty-year rule. Film, as fate would have it, caught a purge-and-intimidation exercise in Saddam's early days; a few hundred Ba'ath members sat themselves down in an auditorium for a presentation by their leader. Saddam unexpectedly gestured for a frightened man, apparently an informant, to step up to the podium and begin reading off the names of every person in the room. With every name, Saddam would ask, "Is he a traitor?" to which the man behind the microphone would answer in the affirmative or negative. Several names called out were indicated as the names of traitors; those men were seized and escorted out of the hall. As the threshing continued, the anxiety in the room boiled over to the point where a terrified sycophant stood up - a balding, mustachioed, sweating wretch - and began shouting Ba'athist and Pan-Arabist slogans in wild-eyed, groveling joy. He was joined, haphazardly, by others desperate to perform appeals for their would-be judicator.

When the list was complete, Saddam apparently asked the remaining group if their loyalty remained steadfast. Not surprisingly, heads bobbled in gibbering approval. Saddam, with his classic, murderous grin - poorly faked by the television double during Liberation, by the way - announced that he would reward and strengthen their devotion to his nation by executing the undedicated themselves.

This is an anecdote - but a telling anecdote, and one repeated, most likely, right up until March 19th of this year. Saddam was not a man who could be fooled from within his own country, let alone in respect to his only option for defense against the United States: a conventional army in ruins, only the specter of nuclear weapons could support the defiance Saddam so characteristically showed to the West. Biological and chemical weapons? Politically dangerous weapons, and even more so after the Cold War's fog had lifted and brought scrutiny to the "smallest" incident of their use - but useful nonetheless.

No dictator will be disarmed voluntarily by exterior forces or, if he retains the capacity for rule - as Saddam had - by his own men.

Those weapons exist, and they will be found.