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.
If Iraq had been processing uranium then there wouldn’t be any dispute about what the tubing was for. We would have discovered the lab.
In the run-up to Gulf War II were we were led to believe that Saddam was building nuclear weapons. The truth is that at best Saddam was buying parts to eventually build a lab.