>>I have to disagree, Bobert. Saddam was KNOWN to have certain prohibited material ( from previous inspections, purchase records and his own stated inventories. The UN Inspection teams were there to see to the destruction of those materials: Saddam could not produce them, nor any proof that they had been destroyed. Nor did he allow the access that the UNR called for to facilities or personnel.<<

Here's what Scott Ritter says:

"Look, let's be honest. The Iraqis were obligated in 1991 to submit a full declaration listing the totality of their holdings of W.M.D., and they didn't do this. They lied. They failed to declare a nuclear weapons program. They failed to declare a biological weapons program, and they under-declared their chemical and ballistic missile capabilities.

"Saddam Hussein intended to retain a strategic deterrent capability, not only to take care of Iran, but also to focus on Israel. What he didn't count on was the tenacity of the inspectors. And very rapidly by June 1991 we had compelled him into acknowledging that he had a nuclear weapons program, and we pushed him so hard that by the summer of 1991, in the same way that a drug dealer who has police knocking at his door flushes drugs down a toilet to get rid of his stash so that he can tell the cops, "I don't have any drugs," the Iraqis, not wanting to admit that they lied, flushed their stash down the toilet. They blew up all of their weapons and buried it in the desert, and then tried to maintain the fiction that they had told the truth.

"And by 1992 they were compelled again because of the tenacity of inspectors to come clean. People say why didn't Saddam Hussein admit being disarmed? In 1992 they submitted a declaration that said everything's been destroyed, we have nothing left. In 1995 they turned over the totality of their document cache. Again, not willingly, it took years of inspections to pressure them. But the bottom line is by 1995 there were no more weapons in Iraq, there were no more documents in Iraq, there was no more production capability in Iraq, because we were monitoring the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure with the most technologically advanced, the most intrusive arms control regime in the history of arms control.

"And we knew that while we couldn't account for everything that the Iraqis said they had destroyed, we could only account for ninety to ninety-five percent, we knew that: (a) we had no evidence of a retained capability and, (b) no evidence that Iraq was reconstituting. And furthermore, the C.I.A. knew this. The British intelligence knew this; Israeli intelligence knew this; German intelligence. The whole world knew this. They weren't going to say that Iraq was disarmed, because nobody could say that. But they definitely knew that the Iraqi capability regarding W.M.D. had been reduced to as near to zero as you could bring it and that Iraq represented a threat to no one when it came to weapons of mass destruction."