Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction
Between Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and the commencement of military action in January 1991, then President George H.W. Bush raised the specter of the Iraqi pursuit of nuclear weapons as one justification for taking decisive action against Iraq. In the classified National Security Directive he signed on January 15, 1991, authorizing the use of force to expel Iraq from Kuwait, he identified Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) against allied forces as an action that would lead the U.S. to seek the removal of Saddam Hussein from power.(1)
In the aftermath of Iraq's defeat, the U.S.-led, U.N. coalition was able to force Iraq to agree to an inspection and monitoring regime, intended to insure that Iraq dismantled its WMD programs and did not take actions to reconstitute them. The means of implementing the relevant U.N. resolutions was the U.N. Special Commission on Iraq (UNSCOM). That inspection regime continued until December 16, 1998 - although it involved interruptions, confrontations, and Iraqi attempts at denial and deception - when UNSCOM withdrew its staff from Iraq in the face of Iraqi refusal to cooperate.
Subsequent to George W. Bush's assumption of the presidency in January 2001, the U.S. made it clear that it could not accept what had become the status quo with respect to Iraq - a country ruled by Saddam Hussein and free to attempt to reconstitute its assorted weapons of mass destruction programs. As part of their campaign against the status quo, which included the clear threat of the eventual use of military force against Iraq, the U.S. and Britain published documents and provided briefings detailing Iraq's WMD programs and its attempts to deceive other nations about its WMD activities.
As a result of the U.S. and British campaign, and after prolonged negotiations between the U.S., Britain, France, Russia and other U.N. Security Council members, the U.N. declared that Iraq must accept even more intrusive inspections than under the earlier inspection regime - to be carried out by the U.N. Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) - or face "serious consequences." Iraq agreed to accept the U.N. requirement and inspections resumed in late November 2002. On December 7, 2002, Iraq submitted a 12,000-page declaration, which claimed that it had no current WMD programs. Intelligence analysts from the United States and other nations immediately began to scrutinize the document, and senior U.S. officials quickly rejected the claims.
The documents presented in this electronic briefing book include the major unclassified U.S. and British assessments of Iraqi WMD programs, the reports of the IAEA and UNSCOM covering the final period prior to the 1998 departure and the period since November 27, 2002, the transcript of a key speech by President George W. Bush, a recently released statement on U.S. policy towards combating WMD, the transcript of and slides for Secretary Powell's presentation to the U.N. on February 5, 2003, and documents from the 1980s and 1990s concerning various aspects of Iraqi WMD activities.