WHO'S THAT GIRL?

Saddam Hussein has been shown on Iraqi TV again, this time in the company of a woman. His wife and daughters are reportedly relaxing in Syria. So who's the chick?

According to US intel, she's Huda Salih Mahdi Ammash--Iraq's top chemical weapons scientist. But who knows when the tape in question was made? There doesn't seem to be anything about it that definitively dates it.

But Ms. Ammash's story brings up an interesting point about Iraq's weapons programs. Here's a little fact that the AP buried:

She played a role in organizing Baath activities in Jordan, Lebanon and Yemen, officials said.

Her father was a high-level party revolutionary who was believed to have been ordered killed by Saddam, officials said.

This kind of thing is probably the #1 reason Saddam doesn't have the bomb yet. He's had smart scientists around him for decades, and he's had French help to build a reactor. Yes, he had Israeli help in "renovating" said reactor, but he may have had some scientists hide the fissile material before the 1981 raid on Osirak. But his own scientists have no real love for the man. He has probably killed their family members as a way to motivate progress, and keeps a gun at their backs while they're working. Many scientists have fled Iraq fearing execution, leading to a brain drain in his most critical programs.

It's a tyrant's dilemma: How much violence and intimidation, and murder and mayhem, is enough to keep the people in line, and how much is too much? Saddam doesn't have the bomb, though he may have had the necessary uranium for a couple of decades. It's safe to say from this and other evidence that he has erred on the side of excess.