Excerpts from previous updates, by subject:

Removed on February 18, 2006

The weapon search

In October 2004, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), headed by Charles Duelfer and tasked with hunting for Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, released a report that presented a mountain of detail about Saddam’s weapon efforts. Among the key findings were:

• Iraq had neither stockpiles of illicit weapons nor any active program to make such weapons.
• Iraq did, however, maintain a breakout potential -- the capability and know-how to rebuild WMD after sanctions were lifted.
• Iraq did not live up to its U.N. obligations. U.N. violations included undeclared equipment, materials and laboratories, procurement, and work on long-range missiles and drones.
• Escaping sanctions was Saddam’s foremost goal, after regime survival, and Iraq worked actively at this task – with great success.
• Years of inspections and sanctions succeeded in causing Iraq to abandon its weapon programs and in causing the progressive decay of its infrastructure for making more weapons, especially nuclear weapons.
• Yet sanctions and inspections were untenable over time – sanctions had eroded greatly and Iraq developed a vast procurement network with which to circumvent them.
• This network included many entities and tarnished the reputations of many countries – among them Belarus, China, Lebanon, France, Jordan, Poland, Russia, Syria, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen, not to mention U.S. firms not named due to the Privacy Act. These entities helped Iraq make $11 billion in clandestine profits, as well as find and procure banned items.
• The ISG could not determine if any WMD-related items crossed the border in the traffic to Syria and others in early 2003, but Duelfer’s judgment is that no “militarily significant stocks” existed or were transferred.
• Evidence was systematically destroyed before the ISG could get in, but actual WMD items may not have been destroyed at that time.

On Nuclear Weapons:

• There is no evidence Iraq sought uranium in Niger or elsewhere after 1991.
• Iraq did try to keep nuclear scientists together. Some of these had retained documents and technology, but this did not amount to an active program.

On Biological Weapons:

• No evidence of mobile labs was found.
• Iraq destroyed most of its stocks in the early 1990s and abandoned its program by 1995.
• There is no evidence of ongoing BW work, but there is more uncertainty in BW than any other weapon program.
• Iraq retained some limited seed stock.
• There was no evidence of smallpox stock.

On Chemical Weapons:

• Iraq retained no stockpile or production program, but much dual-use equipment remains in Iraq.
• Iraq had a real breakout capability, and the timeline was shortened by skimming from the oil-for-food program, which helped Iraq rebuild its dual-use infrastructure.
• Iraq could have produced significant stocks of mustard agent in three to six months, and nerve agent within two years.

On Missile/Delivery Systems:

• Iraq violated the U.N. limit on missile range (150 km) with the Al Samoud 2 missile, and it had “plans or designs for three long-range ballistic missiles with ranges from 400 to 1,000 kilometers, and for a 1,000 km cruise missile.” None of these latter missiles was in production, and only one went beyond the design phase.
• Iraq also used SA-2 components, which was expressly forbidden by the United Nations.
• Iraq seemed to draw a line between this missile work and what it deemed WMD-relevant activity; it did not work on warheads. It did work on propulsion, fuel and guidance.
• Iraq probably did not retain any Scuds after 1991.
• Iraq was buying components and technology for its missile efforts in contravention of sanctions, especially after the 1998 departure of U.N. inspectors. In particular, Iraq received missile help from or negotiated with North Korea, Russia, Poland, and Serbia/Montenegro.

Iraq had done work on UAVs that also violated the 150 km range limit, but there was no evidence these were for use with mass destruction weapons.

Political environment

Hussein’s successor was officially chosen on January 30, 2005, when more than 8.5 million votes were cast in Iraq’s first free elections in over 50 years. Voter turnout was 58%. The United Iraqi Alliance, a Shiite coalition backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani won 48.2% of the vote, and 140 seats on the 275 seat National Assembly. A coalition of two major Kurdish parties won 25.7%, and a bloc led by interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi won 13.8%. Turnout in the Sunni-populated regions was lower than elsewhere, in part because some Sunni groups had called for a boycott of the elections, and in part because of the pervasive security threats in those areas. It now appears that some Sunnis are reengaging, after a spate of violence in April and May. A bloc of some one thousand Sunni clerics and leaders announced an end to their boycott of politics on May 22. Though some Sunnis participated in the drafting of Iraq’s new constitution, they were largely excluded from the process, and did not support the final draft.

After two months of negotiations, the Iraq National Assembly elected Hachim Hasani, a U.S.-educated Sunni Muslim, as speaker. Jalal Talabani, a Kurdish leader, was elected President. Adel Abdul Mahdi, a Shiite Muslim, and Ghazi Yawer, a Sunni Muslim, were elected Vice Presidents. Ibrahim Jaafari, a Shiite physician, was elected Prime Minister.