The WonkLine: July 2, 2009

The Washington Post reports that “Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday.” Hussein also said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda.

Reuters reports that “thousands of U.S. Marines stormed deep into Taliban territory” in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand River valley on Thursday, “launching the biggest military offensive of Barack Obama’s presidency.”

North Korea has test-fired a fourth short-range missile, following three similar launches, the South Korean Yonhap news agency has reported.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) has doubled down on his opposition to the public health insurance option. ““If we create a public option, the public is going to end up paying for it,” Lieberman said.

Dr. J. James Rohack, the new president of the American Medical Association, told CNN that the AMA supports an “American model” that includes both “a private system and a public system, working together.” Rohack then “suggested that the Federal Employee Health Benefit Program available to Congress members and other federal employees could be expanded as a public option. That would avoid having to create a new program from scratch, he said.”

Ezra Klein asks, Does Medicare Pay Below “Cost?”

The Obama administration relaxed eligibility rules for its mortgage modification program yesterday, “lifting the maximum loan-to-value ratio to 125% from 105%.”

A member of the administration’s auto task force said yesterday that “the US government will pull its support from General Motors if the automaker does not get court permission for a speedy exit from bankruptcy protection by July 10.”

Simon Johnson reports that the Treasury Department and the National Economic Council are “not exactly on convergent paths“: “In the debate within the administration during February and March, the economic council apparently was willing to take over a major failed bank; Treasury regarded this as too dangerous, complex and costly.”

In the wake of a domestic victory in the House of Representatives, President Obama is set to push for greater international action on climate change and alternative energy at next week’s G8 Summit in Italy.

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) predicted yesterday that the Senate “may pass legislation to slow climate change and then fail to approve a global treaty that commits nations to do so” because approval of a treaty would require 67 votes, seven more than needed to break a filibuster and pass legislation.

In a 155-page report, the International Union for Conservation of Nature warned that the failure of governments to meet pledges made at a 2002 UN meeting “to stem a rapid decline in biodiversity” threatens with “extinction almost half the world’s coral reef species, a third of amphibians and a quarter of mammals.”

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