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'Easter egg hunt' for WMD is abandoned
By Patrick Cockburn
08 July 2003

When the first American soldiers advanced through Iraq in March, every warehouse with bags of pesticide was eagerly examined in case they might be weapons of mass destruction.

"I can't get hold of any American officers because they are all out trying to win promotion by being the first to find WMD," said a Kurdish official in exasperation just after the fall of Mosul. "It is like a giant Easter egg hunt."

The search now is much more muted. US officers are more worried about the escalating guerrilla war. The Iraqi opposition, which in exile found no difficulty in passing on information about Saddam Hussein's stocks of WMD to intelligence agencies and journalists, has lost interest....

Many of Iraq's problems with the UN inspectors in the 1990s revolved around its inability to prove exactly what had been destroyed in 1991. It had kept inexact records of what weapons it had used in the Iran-Iraq war....