Iraq's use of more than 100,000 chemical munitions against Iranian troops during the 1980s war with Tehran had helped end the war and save Hussein's regime. Duelfer said Hussein also believed that his chemical and biological weapons had deterred the U.S.-led coalition from marching on Baghdad during the 1991 Gulf War.
Duelfer also stated that U.S. intelligence had "almost no contact with Iraq over more than a decade" and had become increasingly separated from reality in the country. He noted, for example, that U.S. experts had insisted before the war that the presence of decontamination trucks was clear evidence that chemical weapons were nearby. But, "when you spend time in Iraq," Duelfer said, "you realize the Iraqis could be selling ice cream out of those vehicles."
Prodded to answer politically charged questions during his testimony, Duelfer seemed to endorse the invasion, saying, "I have to agree -- analytically -- the world is better off" with Hussein out of power.
Duelfer also said that as a result of Hussein's steady efforts, it appeared that U.N. sanctions "were in free fall" by 2001 and that Hussein was breaking them with impunity.
Duelfer's report, which one intelligence official called a cross between "a homicide investigation and a doctoral dissertation," in many ways echoed and amplified Kay's preliminary findings. In January, Kay stunned the White House and the CIA when he announced that "we were almost all wrong" about Iraq's weapons.
But the new report also provides fresh evidence of misjudgments by U.S. and other Western intelligence agencies that warned before the war that Baghdad was secretly stockpiling nerve gases and germ weapons, and was secretly reconstituting its nuclear program.
Duelfer determined that the nuclear effort had been abandoned after the 1991 war and that Iraq's ability to reconstitute the program "progressively decayed after that date." Duelfer found "a limited number" of activities from the last few years that might have "aided" a new nuclear program, including travel curbs and pay raises for Iraq's corps of nuclear scientists to keep them from emigrating.
"Over time, Hussein was getting further away from a nuclear program, not closer," said a U.S. official who briefed reporters on the report on condition he not be identified. "In point of fact, he was much further away from a nuclear program in 2003 than he was in 1991."
