Two detailed reports have thrown serious doubt on whether Iraq had any nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, or even the means to make them, at the time when the US cited this as its major reason for going to war.
The first report was released on Thursday by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank in Washington DC. It cites intelligence information and material uncovered by weapons inspectors to conclude that while Iraq still wanted such weapons, it did not have any, or any means to produce them, in 2002. The one exception was continuing illicit work on long-range missiles.
The second report, in the Washington Post, cites new documentary evidence and testimony from Iraqi scientists showing the same thing. However, this evidence also indicates that Saddam Hussein decided not to prove Iraq鈥檚 lack of weapons of mass destruction to inspectors, as the UN demanded.
Advertisement
The Carnegie report concludes that intelligence showed the threat lay not in actual WMD, but in Iraq鈥檚 determination to acquire them and demonstrated willingness to use them. This danger 鈥渃ould not be allowed to fester unaddressed鈥�, they conclude, but 鈥渢he choice was never between war and doing nothing鈥�.
An unprecedently intrusive and well-funded search by the US since the fall of Baghdad has found little more than UN inspectors did before the war. The Carnegie report says continued 鈥渃oercive鈥� UN inspections, a tactic it has long advocated, would have eventually verified this without war (快猫短视频, 18 September 2002)
Unauthorised interviews
奥别诲苍别蝉诲补测鈥檚 Washington Post report, by Barton Gellman, included 鈥渦nauthorised鈥� interviews with inspectors from the Iraq Survey Group, the US team charged with finding Saddam鈥檚 WMD. These revealed that Iraq鈥檚 pre-1991 WMD stockpile, and its ability to make any, had disintegrated during years of UN inspections and sanctions.
The exception was long-range missiles forbidden by the UN. Modher Tamimi, Saddam鈥檚 chief missile engineer, told Gellman he concealed designs for missiles that could hit Tel Aviv or Riyadh from UN inspectors. Outside experts said Tamimi鈥檚 efforts were impressive, based as they were on antiquated Russian rocketry texts, but added that the designs probably would not have worked.
Other sources told the Post that the head of Iraq鈥檚 bioweapons programme, Rihab Taba, told US interrogators that Iraq had no access to smallpox, while camelpox research ended at the onset of war in 1990 after only 45 days. Western scientists, who used antibody-based detector kits to search Iraqi labs for weapons-capable pathogens, told the Post they found nothing.
Hit list
Yet the Post鈥檚 investigation also revealed that Saddam could have done much more to prove to UN inspectors in 2003 that he had destroyed his weapons.
Gellman uncovered a list, written for Saddam in 1995 after the defection of Saddam鈥檚 son-in-law, Hussein Kamel. It detailed every aspect of illicit weapons production that the Iraqis feared Kamel would tell the UN. It holds no surprises: the UN eventually found and destroyed everything on the list.
If Saddam had given that list to UN inspectors in 2003, it would have gone a long way towards proving he no longer had weapons the inspectors were searching for. But, perhaps unwilling to admit weakness, he did not.