It wasn't the "smoking cannon" that had been promised
Jack Kelly at Irish Pennants reviews the conference:
Excerpt:
1. In one the first tapes, made in 1992, Saddam makes it plain that he considers himself still to be at war with the United States. "The Mother of All Battles is continuing," he said.
2. Discussions on the tapes make it plain Iraq moved quickly to reconstitute all of its WMD programs -- chemical, biological and nuclear -- and poured considerable resources into them.
3. Saddam and his aides were not only confident of their ability to hide their WMD programs from the UN, they were scornful of UNSCOM. In one of the early tapes, an unidentified aide reports to Saddam that the (presumably chemical) warheads had been removed from missiles turned over to UNSCOM for destruction.
4. A remark made by foreign minister Tariq Aziz on one of the later tapes suggests that Iraq had, or thought it was about to acquire, nuclear capability. Saddam, Aziz and others are discussing ways of attacking the U.S. Aziz is touting biological agents, because they would be the easiest to deliver, and the hardest to trace back to Iraq. If there were "destruction" he said, it would be harder for Iraq to conceal its role in a proxy attack.
5. One of the later discussions strongly indicates Saddam was using, or planned to use, proxies to attack the U.S. This interpretation is muddled by what was by far the most serious of many mistakes made by the conference organizers.
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