Hoodwinked

Perhaps Americans have something common with Saddam Hussein:

British officials are circulating a story that Saddam Hussein may have been hoodwinked into believing that Iraq really did possess weapons of mass destruction.
The theory, which is doing the rounds in the upper reaches of Whitehall, is the result of an attempt to find what one official source called a “logical reason” why no chemical and biological weapons had been found in Iraq.
According to the theory, Saddam and his senior advisers and commanders were told by lower-ranking Iraqi officers that his forces were equipped with usable chemical and biological weapons.
The officers did not want to tell their superiors that the weapons were either destroyed or no longer usable.

Only in our case, we pay billions of dollars for our senior commanders to trick us.
Then there’s also this:

Hans Blix, the former US weapons inspector in Iraq, said yesterday that most experts on Iraq now believed Saddam almost certainly destroyed his weapons of mass destruction after the first Gulf War in 1991.
“I think the vast majority of people are feeling there is very little likelihood that they [the Iraqis] had anything, and the biggest chance is that they destroyed them in 1991,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

If Americans believed in holding government officials accountable, some people would be in serious trouble these days.