Saddam worked secretly on WMDs

Saddam Hussein’s goal through the 1990s and until the 2003 U.S. invasion was to end U.N. sanctions on Iraq, while working covertly to restore the country’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction, a report by the chief U.S. weapons inspector says.

“Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq’s WMD capability — which was essentially destroyed in 1991 — after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized, but probably with a different mix of capabilities,” the report said.

Charles A. Duelfer told the Senate Armed Services Committee in testimony yesterday that “Saddam sought to sustain the requisite knowledge base to restart the program eventually.”

In the interim, Mr. Duelfer said, Saddam hoped to keep “the inherent capability to produce such weapons as circumstances permitted in the future.”

Mr. Duelfer said that officials with the Iraq Survey Group continue to receive a “stream of reports about hidden WMD locations” and in one recent case turned up a “partially filled nerve agent container from a 122 mm rocket.”

But, “like others recovered, [it] was from old pre-1991 stocks,” he said, adding “despite these reports and finds, I still do not expect that militarily significant WMD stocks are cached in Iraq.”

Mr. Duelfer was appointed chief weapons inspector in January after then-chief David Kay made headlines by asserting that prewar assessments of Iraq had been “almost all wrong.”

The White House did not endorse Mr. Kay’s findings at the time, saying the Iraq Survey Group had not completed its post-war search for weapons. Several senior Bush-administration officials, meanwhile, had touted Saddam’s weapons “stockpiles” as a central reason for invading.

Mr. Duelfer yesterday said inspectors still cannot “definitively say whether or not WMD materials were transferred out of Iraq before the war,” although he stressed how Iraq’s ability to produce them weakened under the U.N. sanctions implemented after the 1991 Gulf war.

With Iraq’s economy badly damaged and U.N. sanctions, Mr. Duelfer’s report says, Saddam’s plans for a skeletal weapons program that could be mobilized quickly led him to pursue the needed materials through illegal and indirect channels.

Starting in 1997 and peaking in 2001, he developed a giant smuggling operation that hinged on the establishment of “a network of Iraqi front companies, some with close relationships to high-ranking foreign-government officials,” the report says.

Those officials, it says, “worked through their respective ministries, state-run companies and ministry-sponsored front companies to procure illicit goods, services and technologies for Iraq’s WMD-related, conventional arms, and/or dual-use goods programs.”

Syria was Iraq’s “primary conduit for illicit imports” from late 2000 until the start of the U.S. invasion last year, according to the report, which also maintains that the Iraqi Intelligence Service set up front companies to buy prohibited arms from a Syrian totaling $1.2 billion.

“The central bank of Syria was the repository of funds used by Iraq to purchase goods and materials both prohibited and allowed under U.N. sanctions,” the report says.

Totaling nearly 1,000-pages, the report includes a broad history of Saddam’s regime, how he operated and held power through the Iran-Iraq war and the first war with the United States.

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