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While as individuals you and I should seek to be rid of biases that might cloud your judgment*, you must also realize that the rest of the world might not be the same way. To not factor that in is to ignore a fairly substantial set of variables.
I can't answer your question easily at all. The short answer has a lot of it has to do with previous actions and a lot has to do with the ability to put yourself in another person's place and frame of mind and predict based on what you believe the person would do. This takes a lot of practice, I'm still not even all that good at it, but I was able to predict what Saddam would do: he was always going to run and hide. It doesn't take a maestro of game theory to read a dictator like that, just the ability to play chop sticks. I feel like I'm getting off topic, though. The bottom line, the simple truth is that Saddam didn't have the capability to launch an attack on the US, and there were tremendously significant obstacles in attaining or developing the technology to do so even if he wanted to. All of this can be demonstrated through citing articles full of factual information and deducing the situation based solely on those facts. All of this has been demonstrated on TFP repeatedly.
*I don't mean become Vulcan, though. Emotions provide the flavor of life, and are necessary for contentment and balance. It's just important to ensure that emotion doesn't prevent you from making important decisions which have serious consequences.
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