Saddam's WMD program only a dream

Smoke billows from US headquarters at the so-called ''Green Zone'' after an explosion in central Baghdad, Iraq, yesterday. A US report said there was no substance to the main reasons given for invading Iraq. PHOTO: AP

Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs had deteriorated into only hopes and dreams by the time of the US-led invasion last year, a decline wrought by the 1991 Gulf War and years of international sanctions, the chief US weapons hunter found.

And what ambitions Saddam harbored for such weapons were secondary to his goal of evading those sanctions, and he wanted them primarily not to attack the US or to provide them to terrorists, but to oppose his older enemies, Iran and Israel.

The report of weapons hunter Charles Duelfer was presented Wednesday to US senators and the public in the midst of a fierce presidential election campaign in which Iraq and the war of terror have become the overriding issues.

The report chronicles the decay of Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs after its defeat in the Gulf War. By the late 1990s, only its long-range missile efforts continued in defiance of the UN; even then, Iraq's ballistic and cruise missile designs had not proceeded far past the drawing board. Saddam's other plans would have to wait until he was free of the sanctions and free of international attention.

US President George W. Bush's spokesman said the report justified the decision to go to war. Campaigning in Pennsylvania, Bush defended the decision to invade.

"There was a risk, a real risk, that Saddam Hussein would pass weapons or materials or information to terrorist networks," the president said in a speech in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania. "In the world after Sept. 11, that was a risk we could not afford to take."

A spokesman for his opponent, Senator John Kerry, said the report "underscores the incompetence of George Bush's Iraq policy."

"George Bush refuses to come clean about the ways he misled our country into war," Kerry spokesman David Wade added.

"In short, we invaded a country, thousands of people have died, and Iraq never posed a grave or growing danger," said Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia.

Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group drew on interviews with senior Iraqi officials, 40 million pages of documents and classified intelligence to conclude that Iraq destroyed its undeclared chemical and biological stockpiles under pressure of UN sanctions by 1992 and never resumed production.

The US-led invasion pushed one of Iraq's leaders into seeking chemical weapons to defend the country. But it doesn't appear that Saddam's son Uday located any.

Iraq ultimately abandoned its biological weapons programs in 1995, largely out of fear they would be discovered and tougher enforcement imposed.

"Indeed, from the mid-1990s, despite evidence of continuing interest in nuclear and chemical weapons, there appears to be a complete absence of discussion or even interest in BW at the presidential level," according to a summary of Duelfer's 1,000-page report.

And Iraq also abandoned its nuclear program after the war, and there was no evidence it tried to reconstitute it.

Saddam's intentions to restart his programs were never formalized.

"The former regime had no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions," the summary says. "Neither was there an identifiable group of WMD policymakers or planners separate from Saddam. Instead his lieutenants understood WMD revival was his goal from their long association with Saddam and his infrequent, but firm, verbal comments and directions to them."

Duelfer's findings contradict most of the assertions by the Bush administration and the US intelligence community about Iraq's threat in 2002 and early last year. The White House had argued that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons stockpiles and production lines and had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program.