U.S. 'Almost All
Wrong' on Weapons
Report on Iraq
Contradicts Bush Administration Claims
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 7, 2004; Page A01
The 1991 Persian
Gulf War and subsequent U.N. inspections destroyed Iraq's illicit weapons
capability and, for the most part, Saddam Hussein did not try to rebuild it,
according to an extensive report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq
that contradicts nearly every prewar assertion made by top administration officials
about Iraq.
Charles A. Duelfer, whom the Bush
administration chose to complete the U.S. investigation of Iraq's weapons
programs, said Hussein's ability to produce nuclear weapons had
"progressively decayed" since 1991. Inspectors, he said, found no
evidence of "concerted efforts to restart the program."
The findings were similar on biological and
chemical weapons. While Hussein had long dreamed of developing an arsenal of
biological agents, his stockpiles had been destroyed and research stopped years
before the United States led the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Duelfer said
Hussein hoped someday to resume a chemical weapons effort after U.N. sanctions
ended, but had no stocks and had not researched making the weapons for a dozen
years.
Duelfer's report, delivered yesterday to two
congressional committees, represents the government's most definitive
accounting of Hussein's weapons programs, the assumed strength of which the
Bush administration presented as a central reason for the war. While previous
reports have drawn similar conclusions, Duelfer's assessment went beyond them
in depth, detail and level of certainty.
"We were almost all wrong" on Iraq,
Duelfer told a Senate panel yesterday.
President Bush, Vice President Cheney and
other top administration officials asserted before the U.S. invasion that Iraq
was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, had chemical and biological
weapons and maintained links to al Qaeda affiliates to whom it might give such
weapons to use against the United States.
But after extensive interviews with Hussein
and his key lieutenants, Duelfer concluded that Hussein was not motivated by a
desire to strike the United States with banned weapons, but wanted them to
enhance his image in the Middle East and to deter Iran, against which Iraq had
fought a devastating eight-year war. Hussein believed that "WMD helped
save the regime multiple times," the report said.
The report also provides a one-of-a-kind look
at Hussein's personality. The former Iraqi leader participated in numerous
interviews with one Arabic-speaking FBI interrogator. Hussein told his
questioner he felt threatened by U.S. military power, but even then, he
maintained a fondness for American movies and literature. One of his favorite
books was Ernest Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea." He hoped for
improved relations with the United States and, over several years, sent
proposals through intermediaries to open a dialogue with Washington.
Hussein, the report concluded, "aspired
to develop a nuclear capability" and intended to work on rebuilding
chemical and biological weapons after persuading the United Nations to lift
sanctions. But the report also notes: "The former regime had no formal
written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions. Neither was
there an identifiable group of WMD policy makers or planners separate from
Saddam" tasked to take this up once sanctions ended.
Among the most diplomatically explosive
revelations was that Hussein had established a worldwide network of companies
and countries, most of them U.S. allies, that secretly helped Iraq generate $11
billion in illegal income and locate, finance and import banned services and
technologies. Among those named are officials or companies from Belarus, China,
Lebanon, France, Indonesia, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Turkey, Syria, the United
Arab Emirates and Yemen.
Duelfer said one of Hussein's main strategic
goals was to persuade the United Nations to lift economic sanctions, which had
devastated the country's economy and, along with U.N. inspections, had forced
him to stop weapons programs. Even as Hussein became more adept at bypassing
the sanctions, he worked to erode international support for them.
Democrats seized on the exhaustive report,
which comes amid a presidential race dominated so far by the Iraq war, to argue
that the administration misled the American public about the risk Hussein posed
and then miscalculated the difficulties of securing postwar peace.
"Now we have a report today that there
clearly were no weapons of mass destruction," Sen. John Edwards (N.C.),
the Democratic vice presidential candidate, said in West Palm Beach, Fla.
"All of that known, and Dick Cheney said again last night that he would
have done everything the same. George Bush has said he would have done
everything the same. . . . They are in a complete state of denial about what is
happening in Iraq."
Neither Bush nor challenger
John F. Kerry spoke directly about the report yesterday, though at a campaign
appearance in Pennsylvania the president emphasized that Hussein was a threat
to the United States.
"There was a risk -- a real risk -- that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons
or materials or information to terrorist networks," Bush said. "In
the world after September 11th, that was a risk we could not afford to take."
Supporters rallied around the administration,
which has suffered a string of setbacks recently with revelations that the CIA
had warned the White House about the strength of Iraqi insurgents, and from
former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer, who said this week that the United
States should have put more troops in Iraq during the invasion.
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.)
said: "We didn't have to find plans or weapons to see what happened when
Saddam Hussein used chemical and biological weapons on his own people. So just
because we can't find them and Saddam Hussein had 12 years to hide them doesn't
mean he didn't have them and didn't use them."
But Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.)
said the report showed U.N. inspections and sanctions had worked in preventing
Hussein from pursuing his weapons ambitions. "Despite the effort to focus
on Saddam's desires and intentions, the bottom line is Iraq did not have either
weapons stockpiles or active production capabilities at the time of the war."
Duelfer's report contradicted a number of
specific claims administration officials made before the war.
It found, for example, that Iraq's
"crash" program in 1991 to build a nuclear weapon before the Persian
Gulf War was far from successful, and was nowhere near being months away from
producing a weapon, as the administration asserted. Only micrograms of enriched
uranium were produced and no weapon design was completed. The CIA and
administration officials have said they were surprised by the advanced state of
Iraq's pre-1991 nuclear program, which was discovered after the war, and
therefore were more prone to overestimate Iraq's capability when solid proof
was unavailable.
There also was no evidence that Iraq
possessed or was developing a mobile biological weapons production system, an
assertion Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and others made before the
invasion. The two trailers that were found in early 2003 were "almost
certainly designed and built . . . exclusively for the generation of
hydrogen" gas.
Duelfer also found no information to support
allegations that Iraq sought uranium from Africa or any other country after
1991, as Bush once asserted in a major speech before the invasion. The only two
contacts with Niger that were discovered were an invitation to the president of
Niger to visit Baghdad, and a visit to Baghdad by a Niger minister in 2001
seeking petroleum products for cash. There was one offer to Iraq of
"yellowcake" uranium, and that was from a Ugandan businessman
offering uranium from Congo. The deal was turned down, and the Ugandan was told
that Baghdad was not interested because of the sanctions.
Nuclear Weapons
Despite the U.S. intelligence judgment that Iraq in 2002 had reconstituted its
nuclear weapons program, Duelfer reported that after 1991, Baghdad's nuclear
program had "progressively decayed." He added that the Iraq Survey
Group investigators had found no evidence "to suggest concerted efforts to
restart the program."
There was an attempt to keep nuclear
scientists together and two scientists were discovered to have saved documents
and technology related to the uranium enrichment program, but they appeared to
be the exception.
Although some steps were taken that could
have helped restart the nuclear program, using oil-for-food money, Duelfer
concluded that his team "uncovered no indication that Iraq had resumed
fissile material or nuclear weapons research and development activities since
1991."
Biological Weapons
Duelfer's report is the first U.S. intelligence assessment to state flatly that
Iraq had secretly destroyed its biological weapons stocks in the early 1990s.
By 1995, though, and under U.N. pressure, it abandoned its efforts.
The document rules out the possibility that
biological weapons might have been hidden, or perhaps smuggled into another
country, and it finds no evidence of secret biological laboratories or ongoing
research that could be firmly linked to a weapons program.
Some biological "seed
stocks" -- frozen samples of relatively common microbes such as bolutinum
-- were found in the home of one Iraqi offiicial last year. But the survey team
said Iraq had "probably" destroyed any bulk quantities of germs it
had at the height of the program in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The team also found no evidence of stocks of the smallpox virus, which the
administration had claimed it had.
Chemical Weapons
Duelfer's report said that no chemical weapons existed and that there is no
evidence of attempts to make such weapons over the past 12 years. Iraq retained
dual-use equipment that could be used for such an effort.
"The issue is that he has chemical
weapons, and he's used them," Cheney told CNN in March 2002. The National
Intelligence Estimate said that "although we have little specific
information on Iraq's CW stockpile, Saddam probably has stocked at least 100
metric tons and possibly as much as 500 MT of CW agents -- much of it added in
the last year."
One of the reasons the intelligence community
feared a chemical weapons arsenal was that U.N. inspectors said Iraq had not
fully explained missing chemical agents during the 1990s. The report determined
that unanswered questions were almost certainly the result of poor accounting.
Iraq's responses to U.N. inspectors regarding
chemical weapons appear to have been truthful, and where incomplete, with
differing recollections among former top officials, mostly the result of fading
memories of when or how stockpiles were destroyed. Those were the identical
reasons Iraq offered to U.N. inspectors before the war.
One of the key findings of the report is that
"Saddam never abandoned his intentions to resume a chemical weapons effort
when sanctions were lifted."
The evidence included in the report to back
up claims of Hussein's intent is described as "extensive, yet fragmentary
and circumstantial." The report quotes a single scientist who reached that
conclusion in hindsight and based on information he learned from the U.S.
inspection team long after U.S. troops had captured Iraq.
After 17 months of investigation, the U.S.
team was able to find only 30 of 130 scientists identified with Iraq's pre-1991
chemical weapons programs. "None of those interviewed had any knowledge of
chemical weapons programs" or knew of anyone involved in such work,
according to the report. There was one exception, the reported noted, from a
scientist who maintained he was asked to make a chemical agent, but that story
was uncorroborated and there was no follow-up.
Delivery Systems
Iraq's secret quest to develop a more powerful missile was discovered and
disrupted by U.N. weapons inspectors in the weeks before the U.S.-led invasion.
In the 19 months since then, the survey team has uncovered more evidence
suggesting that Hussein intended to use the Al Samoud 2 and other proposed
missiles to extend the reach of his military beyond the country's borders.
Iraq was allowed to continue developing
short-range missiles for self-defense under the terms of the U.N. agreement
that ended the 1991 Gulf War. But the Al Samoud 2, which Iraq began building in
2001, was clearly designed for flights exceeding the U.N.-imposed 93-mile
limit, the new report says. And Duelfer's team found blueprints for missiles
with potential ranges up to 10 times as far.
The team "uncovered Iraqi plans or
designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000
kilometers (250 to 621 miles), and for a 1,000-km-range (932-mile) cruise missile,"
the report says. It adds that none of the planned missiles was in production,
and only one of them had progressed beyond the design phase.
The report concludes that Iraq "clearly
intended to reconstitute long-range delivery systems," and maintains that
the missiles, if built, could potentially have been combined with biological,
chemical or nuclear warheads, if Hussein acquired them.
At the same time, the missile that U.S.
military planners had most feared in the run-up to the invasion appears to have
vanished. While Bush administration officials had asserted that Hussein had
hidden a small arsenal of Scud missiles, Duelfer said interviews and documents
suggest Iraq "did not retain such missiles after 1991."
Staff writers Dafna Linzer
and Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
Link to the Original: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12115-2004Oct6.html