That's interesting--hadn't heard that. Might shed some light on Wilson's first Niger trip and Martino's early forgeries.
About the possibility that the forgeries initially were intended to stop Clinton invading Iraq, this was mentioned by Michael Ledeen in this article:
SNIP
JJA: No, and it wasn't originally designed to stop Bush. It was designed to stop Clinton.
JJA: True, and I'll get to that in a second. But the documents were forged earlier, almost certainly by 2000.
ML: Why didn't they surface earlier?
JJA: Because they weren't needed. Clinton looked like he might have been on the verge of going to war, but he didn't, so the documents got filed away. They were used later, as part of an effort to deny Bush that U.N. vote.
ML: But you think the French were trying to convince us to bite on a Saddam-wanted-uranium-from-Niger scam?
JJA: Look at page 76 of the Silberman-Robb Report. CIA had received three reports from "a liaison intelligence service" in late '01 and early 2002. "One of these reports explained that...during meetings on July 5-6, 2000, Niger and Iraq had signed an agreement for the sale of 500 tons of uranium." And the "liaison service" provided a "verbatim text" of the agreement. Got that? Not the document, but a text. They were keeping the documents to themselves, and they wouldn't tell us the source, because, they said, they were afraid of leaks.
SNIP
However, I distinctly remember seeing this mentioned by someone else before Ledeen published this article. Unfortunately to find out who came up with this suggestion first (and when) will require a much longer search.
Note also that the time of the burglary in the Niger embassy does not fit with the earlier date for the forgery. On the other hand one may wonder if the French (if it was they who produced the documents) really needed to "purloin" the stamps from the Niger embassy in Rome. If this event was at all connected with the documents, maybe it was just a ruse to try and divert attention towards the Italians.