How the sanctions worked

It turns out the antiwar crowd was right that national leaders’ decisions on what to do about Iraq were based on oil and greed — they were just wrong about which countries’ leaders.

According to the new Iraq Survey Group study by intelligence analyst Charles A. Duelfer, Saddam Hussein systematically bribed or greased the palms of officials and businessmen from permanent members of the U.N. Security Council — France, Russia and China — to undermine U.N. sanctions. That strategy worked. And Saddam’s corruption of the Oil for Food program bankrolled his lethal projects.

Oil for Food was supposed to feed the hungry in Iraq, but it turned into a bonanza that delivered $350 million to Saddam’s Military Industrial Commission in 2001. Saddam said in 2000, “We have said with certainty that the [U.N.] embargo will not be lifted by a Security Council resolution but will corrode by itself.” Mr. Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “sanctions had steadily weakened to the point where Iraq, in 2000-2001, was confidently designing missiles around components that could only be obtained outside sanctions.”

The bottom line: Those who argued President Bush and the world should “let the sanctions work” had no idea the sanctions were funding plans for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) with missiles that could propel them beyond Iraq.

Worse, while Mr. Duelfer expects to find no militarily significant caches of WMD in Iraq, that doesn’t mean they all were destroyed. As his report noted, “We cannot definitively say whether or not WMD materials were transferred out of Iraq before the war. Neither can we definitively answer some questions about possibly retained stocks.”

Saddam learned from the Persian Gulf war that he should have had more WMD, and more powerful WMD, not that he should give them up. Saddam believed Baghdad’s biological and chemical weapons “deterred Coalition Forces from pressing their attack beyond the goal of freeing Kuwait.”

Mr. Duelfer believed Iraq would have developed more lethal weapons: nukes. As he testified, many senior Iraqis believed “they had blundered in invading Kuwait before completing their nuclear weapons program.”

And: “Those around Saddam seemed quite convinced that once sanctions were ended —and all other things being equal — Saddam would renew his efforts in this field.” (“This field” means nukes.) Coverage of the Duelfer report has concentrated on the politics of the report — like all Page One stories, it is bad for Mr. Bush — and Saddam’s December 2002 announcement to top lieutenants that he had no WMD, so they would have to rely on a very different defense strategy.

(Note: If Saddam’s top military men didn’t know the regime lacked significant WMD until December 2002, maybe it’s not a sign of gross incompetence that the CIA did not know either.)

Other bad news from the report: “By 2003, Iraq would have been able to produce mustard agent in a period of months and nerve agent in less than a year or two.”

Saddam was so unafraid of the United States and the United Nations after losing the Persian Gulf war that he used WMD on southern Shi’ite rebels in his own country in 1991.

Former U.S. Gen. Tommy Franks used to deride the Oil for Food program as “Oil for Palaces.” The Duelfer report, however, paints the program as more like “Oil for Propaganda.” And Oil for WMD Countries corrupted by Saddam’s henchmen called for ending U.N. sanctions because they led to more suffering among the Iraqi people. With pockets bulging, leaders in these countries did the bidding of the one man who caused the suffering as he prepared to amass an arsenal that could spread death across the globe.

War critics in America, who will never look at the Duelfer report, will cite it as proof the war in Iraq was ill-considered. Apparently, they don’t care that Saddam misled the world.

Or that he was gearing up to manufacture more lethal weapons.

Or that he killed Sh’iite Iraqis with WMD under the United Nations’ watch.

They only care about bashing George Bush.

Debra J. Saunders is a nationally syndicated columnist.