Iraq had no WMD at time of US invasion: chief inspector
(* serious business Bush doesn't want you to notice)
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Iraq (news - web sites) had no active chemical, biological or nuclear programs at the time of the US-led invasion in 2003 having given up its weapons of mass destruction in 1991, the chief US weapons inspector concluded in a report.
Charles Duelfer, head of the US Iraq Survey Group, found that Iraq's nuclear capability, far from being reconstituted as the United States had insisted before the war, was "decaying rather than being preserved" and would have taken years to rebuild, an official familiar with the report said.
President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites), although intent on preserving the "intellectual capital" acquired over the years of weapons development, set the end of UN sanctions as a higher priority.
This led him to give up stockpiled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and ultimately the programs, the official said.
"In terms of getting rid of weapons, by the end of 1991 they had gotten rid of just about everything," said the official, who briefed reporters before Duelfer's testified to Congress on Wednesday.
Saddam clung to the capabilities to produce weapons until as late as 1996 when the defection of Hussein Kamal, the Iraqi leader's son-in-law, led to the discovery of a biological warfare program by UN arms inspectors, according to Duelfer's account.
More than 1,000 pages long, Duelfer's report traces the forces that propelled Iraq's WMD programs from the 1982-88 war with Iran, through the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites), the 12-year period after when UN sanctions were in place, and finally 2003 US-led invasion.
His conclusions were drawn from documents, testimony and debriefings of Saddam Hussein.
"He was not loquacious on the WMD activities, but he certainly put into perspective how he viewed threats," the official said of Saddam.
"There is material we have of his internal deliberations which I think are revealing about how he would use the weapons, and it's really kind of interesting that he is really focused on the Iranian threat," he said.
"What he did say was that he was very sensitive to the Iranian program, the Iranian WMD program, and he was going to match them," the official said.
Saddam and other Iraqi officials made clear that they were convinced that chemical weapons saved Iraq from defeat in the 1982-88 war against Iran and had deterred the United States from marching on Baghdad in 1991, the official said.
Duelfer concluded that Saddam intended to restart chemical, biological and nuclear programs once sanctions were lifted.
"Basically he decided his priority was to get out of sanctions, and you see that carried out throughout the rest of the 90s," said the official.
"With that priority, activities were continued to sustain WMD capabilities."
"They were making judgements all along -- what could they get away with?," he said.
Their strategy initially was to go along with UN Security Council resolutions, but when the process dragged on and as Iraq gained unexpected access to funds and influence through the oil-for-food program it shifted to an effort to erode the sanctions, the official said.
But the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States abruptly changed the situation.
The support Iraq gained on the UN Security Council vanished and "the erosion stopped," the official said, suggesting that even as the United States was moving towards war the sanctions regime had tightened.
The US search for weapons after the war found no stockpiles of weapons, no sign chemical weapons had been produced after 1991, no civilian facilities that could be rapidly converted to chemical agent production, and no plans to restart them, the official said.
The few chemical munitions found were made before 1991, and were decaying.
"We found some laboratories under the control of the Mukhabarat," the official said. "It appears they were producing small amounts of poison not as military weapons but for the purposes of assassination. These were laboratories not declared to the UN, which were concealed."
He said it would have taken one to two years to re-establish chemical warfare production and "months" to resume production of biological agents.
The nuclear program was was setback by "years," he said.
"They would have had to do a lot. It's a big infrastructure they would have had to recreate. Certainly not starting from scratch, not starting from scrath. They had a lot of the talent," he said.
Although Saddam tried to keep teams of nuclear scientists together, the official said, "He was further away in 2003 than he was in 1991."
"So the nuclear program was decaying rather than being preserved," he |
