In his book Fiasco and in this interview with Hugh Hewitt, Tom Ricks points to the 1998 Desert Fox campaign against suspected wmd sites in Iraq as evidence that containment worked. But Clinton himself had no idea how much wmd was destroyed in that campaign. He told Larry King on July 27, 2003: “When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn’t know.” Even after the invasion, in April 2003, his defense secretary, William Cohen, still believed we’d find wmd. What’s more, the inspection process was not about running around the country searching for stuff. Iraq was obligated to provide “verifiable evidence” that it had, in fact, destroyed its wmd stocks and wmd-related material. As Cohen explained in 1998: “[Inspectors] have to find documents, computer disks, production points, ammunition areas in an area that size [California]. Hussein has said, ‘we have no program now.’ We’re saying, ‘prove it.’ He says he has destroyed all his nerve agent. [W]e’re asking ‘where, when and how?'” By mid-March 2003, regardless one’s postion on the inspection process, UN inspection reports still showed that Saddam had not complied with numerous disarmament resolutions. Post-invasion, Charles Duelfer noted that inspectors had discovered “clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD production as soon as sanctions were lifted.” And UNMOVIC’s May 30, 2003 report detailed Iraq’s attempt “to conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks. ”
On a separate note, the current bomb plot reminded me of two photos (scroll down to figures 1 and 2) in the Duelfer report on alleged unsuccessful attempts by Saddam’s intelligence service (IIS) to weaponized perfume bottles.
It failed. From the Duelfer report (p. 43):
