Was Saddam Conned on WMDs?

This is from the Guardian

New theory for Iraq's missing WMD: Saddam was fooled into thinking he had them

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.
The trouble for Britain was, the theory goes, that MI6's informants were the senior officials close to Saddam - with the result that British intelligence was also hoodwinked.

The hypothesis, which is being spread privately by officials, is open to the interpretation that the government is searching for an excuse, however implausible, for failure to discover any WMD in Iraq.

Sorry, but i think this is a stretch. It just does not square with the real risks the scientists and officers would have faced. Imagine, Saddam or Uday orders a live demonstration of the weapons (maybe against a bunch of political prisoners). What happens when the army commanders admit that they don't really have the weapons? The outcome would not have been pretty, and the generals knew that.

Wouldn't they be more likely to understate the number and effectiveness of the weapons? Blame it on the supply people or the scientists?

This argument calls to mind the sophistical attempts of revisionist historians to explain away VENONA and the Soviet documents that came to light in the 1990s. When these turned out to confirm that the Soviets did have spies throughout the US (including Hiss, White, and the Rosenbergs), revisionists claimed that the KGB operatives were lying, that they made stuff up to advance their careers.

In their new book, In Denial, Klehr and Haynes demolish this argument. They point out that is bears more resemblance to movies like Our Man in Havana and books like The Tailor of Panama than to the reality of KGB work. They wrote:

The Soviet KGB, however, lived in a state of institutionalized anxiety, constantly on the watch for hostile intelligence services foisting double agents and disinformation on it. The implication that a succession of KGB station chiefs in New York, Washington, and San Francisco, over a period of years, successfully conspired to conduct a massive con game, and that either they had been bamboozled by their own field officers or they were deceiving Moscow by claiming to have scores of fictitious agents, is simply risible. Any officer practicing such deceit would risk not merely recall and discipline but, during the Stalin era, execution. KGB headquarters was not a credulous patsy but a suspicious taskmaster.