I'd see it as a rhetorical trope - rather equivalent to saying "If Tony Blair told me the Earth was round, I'd start worrying about falling over the edge."

However an insensitive one, I accept, and one that would never come from anyone who had ever met Saddam's exiled victims.

I'm reminded of the way that many people in the Second World War were reluctanta to beieve stories about Nazi atrocities because of the lies about such things that had been told in the previous war.

Sadly it seems that there are people sometimes who put into practice the propaganda lies from previous generations.