If Saddam had just received the tubing then he didn’t have a uranium processing facility up and running and producing enriched uranium. Ergo any yellowcake that he had was still yellowcake.
And have you ever seen a picture of this tubing or a stockpile of yellowcake? I’ve never seen such a picture. Evidently cameras must be hard to find in Iraq.
I didn’t say it wasn’t yellowcake. I said Saddam had procured tubing. He was preparing for the day sanctions would be lifted... which was apparently coming soon since so many nations were already flagrantly violating sanctions and the pressure to lift them for “humanitarian reasons” was enormous. In the meanwhile through the Qadeer Khan Network at least 7 rogue states could together pursue their goals as a sort of team, compartmentalized, with no state needing to have a complete program.
I don’t think anyone thought he had the enrichment centrifuges up and running as we could detect that the same way we detected Iran doing it. The contention at the time of the runup to war was that Iraq was still trying to procure centrifuge components, and perfect a centrifuge design, hence the shipments of high tolerance tubing- the tolerances on the inside being exceedingly high. The press dutifully repeated Iraq’s claim that the tubing was just for Palestinian-style rockets and indeed I believe Iraq showed them some rockets made from the stuff but the regime had gradually upped the internal tolerance requirements over different orders to the point that the expense of premium materials, corrosive resistance and milling didn’t make sense for cheap explosive rockets. The material was not the ideal choice for the job as centrifuge parts but Iraq couldn’t get its hands on the good stuff and was making do.
The admin didn’t claim Iraq had actually procured yellowcake- that was a straw man in the Wilson case. The assertion was that Iraq had sent a delegation to an unspecified African country to inquire about future purchases of yellowcake. The country in question has never been revealed but thanks to Joe Wilson the assumption was that it was Niger, though yellowcake could also be obtained from defunct mines in Congo and perhaps even from other African states... Mali, South Africa and Libya come to mind, and the Tinner family arrested in Switzerland for proliferating was tied in with South African shady figures.
In any case an official in Niger told Wilson that an Iraqi businessman had made a proposal to them which they interpreted as an inquiry about buying yellowcake.
Iraq admitted there was an Iraqi delegation to Niger in 1999 but claimed it was trying to make a trade deal for other things. Niger’s other exports as I recall were chickpeas and goat meat, or some such. It just so happened that Iraq’s admitted chickpea negotiator had more of a history for making rants on nuclear matters and the need for nuclear capability than for any expertise on agribusiness.
In fact the super dooper antiwar side’s deep cover spy Valerie Plame was supposedly involved in one of the tubing shipment interdictions in Jordan. Of course that could be complete nonsense. But no one disputes Iraq was procuring tubing, not even Iraq. The dispute was between the one side which accepted Iraq’s explanation that it was for rockets [in a country already full of such conventional stuff] and the side which noted that using those tubes for common rockets was a bit like using gold foil for toilet paper. It’s dual use but some uses are more plausible than others. Either way as I recall this was still a violation of the sanctions, and I think a German company caught hell for it, but it was not as obvious as trying to order maraging steel.