Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction. While he certainly harbored ambitions to get them, the Iraqi programs to build them had decayed to become mere wisps of what they once were. That is the conclusion of the final report, released last week, of the chief U.S. weapons hunter, Mr. Charles Duelfer.
His conclusions are a powerful indictment against the U.S. case for invading Iraq, although Bush administration officials and supporters continue to insist that the U.S.-led war was both necessary and beneficial. Mr. Duelfer's report also provides comfort for supporters of the United Nations: U.N. sanctions helped dismantle Iraq's WMD programs, and the U.N. inspection regime also gave an accurate assessment of those programs.
Mr. Duelfer heads the Iraq Survey Group, which was put together after the invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003 to provide a complete and accurate assessment of Iraq's WMD programs. It comprised more than 1,000 intelligence, military and support personnel, and has had access to senior Iraqi officials (including Hussein himself) and former Iraqi scientists, 40 million pages of documents and classified intelligence.