Not really... Hussein definitely intended to fully reconstitute his nuclear program and BCW programs, but in the meanwhile Hussein was outsourcing his programs. That is why we found his nuclear scientist Obeidi working on Qadaffi’s program in Libya- the same scientist in whose garden the prototype for one of Saddam’s centrifuges wad found.
It was also no coincidence that was around the time we rolled up the arms trading network of Pakistan’s Qadeer Khan, and not long after that Israel took out a nuclear lab in Syria that had been hosting North Koreans.
Those parts of it the Iraqis couldn’t bury or hide ended up on Russian transports before the fall of Saddam, and Saddam awarded the Russian General Primakov for his work in an official ceremony.
The [Voelcker] report also provides a list, which runs to 60 pages, of influential individuals or groups awarded lucrative oil allocations by Iraq because they “espoused pro-Iraq views or organized anti-sanctions activities.” Here again, the range is astonishing. In addition to Messrs. Galloway and Pasqua (each of whom was given oil allocations of 11 million barrels), one finds the names of a pro-Iraq Vatican priest (2.5 million), the Palestinian Liberation Front (nine million), the French-Iraqi Amity society (11.8 million), Burma’s forestry minister (27 million), the Orthodox Church of Russia (two million), and the Presidential Office of Russia (21.3 million).
Among the handful of Americans named by Mr. Volcker is *** Shakir Al-Khafaji (12 million barrels), a well-connected Detroit-area businessman who led a delegation of anti-war Congressional Democrats to Baghdad in September 2002 and who funded an anti-sanctions documentary produced by former weapons inspector Scott Ritter. *** Mr. Al-Khafaji’s financial involvement with Saddam was first documented in these pages by our Robert Pollock in March 2004.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ..