FBI Interviews: Hussein Lied About WMD Out of Fear of Iran

Saddam Hussein let the world believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction because he did not want to appear weak to Iran, according to the Washington Post.

In interviews with the FBI before he was hanged, the former Iraqi president also denounced Usama bin Laden as "a zealot" and said the United States was not Iraq's enemy, the Post reports.

In fact, he claimed, he felt so vulnerable to the threat from "fanatic" leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a "security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region," according to declassified accounts of the interviews released on Wednesday and published in the Washington Post