Right up to the end the dictator who fooled the world was bluffing — even to his closest aides. He was, according to testimony of his most senior henchmen released last week, a master deceiver who told his generals before the invasion of Iraq that he had “something up his sleeve”.

Aha, thought his generals, our leader is going to deploy a weapon of mass destruction after all.

Then, just days before the war began, Saddam Hussein told his last meeting of government ministers, according to one figure present, that they should “resist one week and after that I will take over”. The ministers took it to mean that Saddam really did have a secret weapon to save the day.

After so long under Saddam’s tyranny, not even the elite members of the regime could be sure what the truth was. As Saddam once privately confided to Ali Hassan al-Majid, a senior minister, the secret of war was “deceiving” — and he was expert at it.

Only now is it clear that Iraq’s military might was all a mirage, a smokescreen that gulled everyone.

Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, as the comprehensive report of the Iraq survey group (ISG), published last week, makes plain. No stockpiles. No biological, chemical or nuclear programmes of any significant size. No secret missiles. And nothing remotely ready at 45 minutes’ notice.

After months of investigation on the ground, hours of interviews with the most senior figures in the regime and 1,200 pages of report, the investigators’ central conclusion is bald: Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction.

It begs two questions. How did George W Bush and Tony Blair, who accused Saddam of being an imminent and growing threat to world stability, get it so wrong? And how did Saddam, who knew he had no weapons, so misjudge the resolve of America and Britain?

The answers to both lie to a large extent in the weird, cocooned world that Saddam created for himself and which is revealed in the fine detail of the ISG’s account of the interrogations of senior figures in the regime.

“FOR the first 10 years we thought he was doing the right thing,” Tariq Aziz, former deputy prime minister of Iraq, told investigators.

Saddam instilled order in the troubled country by ruthlessly eradicating opponents. He did not murder anyone “personally” while he was president, said Aziz without apparent irony. Instead “he would tell the security services to take care of things, and they would take care of it”.

A grisly example was recounted to investigators by Abd al-Tawab Mullah Huwaysh, Iraq’s former minister of military industrialisation. He confirmed that Saddam had ordered the execution of a health minister and had the dismembered body delivered to the victim’s wife. The minister had unwisely suggested that Saddam should temporarily step down from office.

Such brutality promoted a culture of sycophancy and confusion among the elite. Government committees typically tried to second-guess Saddam’s whims, says the report. Even “loyal dissent” was rare. According to Aziz, two members of a senior committee known as The Quartet would usually argue for “whatever policy they thought Saddam wanted”.

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