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The Iraq Sanctions Worked
And other revelations from David Kay's report.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, October 7, 2003, at 4:08 PM PT

David Kay's interim report on whether Saddam Hussein had a serious program to build weapons of mass destruction—an investigation that Kay and 1,500 agents from the Pentagon's Iraq Survey Group have been conducting for three months now—is a shockingly lame piece of work.

President Bush has insisted that the report proves Saddam "was a danger to the world" and thus vindicates the war. Secretary of State Colin Powell chimed in that the Kay report left him "even more convinced … that we did the right thing."

These statements were mustered to counter criticisms from Democratic senators who, upon reading the report, proclaimed that it proves only that Bush had no basis for whipping up prewar fears of an imminent Iraqi danger.

A close reading of the actual, unclassified report—which Kay delivered as testimony on Oct. 2 to a panel of several congressional committees—reveals not only that Bush's critics are closer to the mark, but something much more significant: that Saddam wanted and, in some cases, tried to resurrect the weapons programs that he had built in the 1980s, but that the United Nations sanctions and inspections prevented him from doing so.

First, let us dispose of the president's argument for taking the report as proof that Saddam posed a "danger to the world." On the White House lawn last Friday, Bush recited the report's finding that Iraq's WMD program "spanned more than two decades" and "involved thousands of people, billions of dollars."

The report does contain these figures, in precisely those words. However, it does not claim, or even pretend to suggest, that the WMD program consumed so much manpower or money toward the end of its run—i.e., on the eve of Gulf War II. In context, the numbers clearly refer to how much Iraq put into the program through its entire 20-plus-year duration. And elsewhere, the report notes that most of this effort was undertaken before Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf War of 1991.

For instance, there's this eyebrow-raising sentence halfway into the report: "Multiple sources with varied access and reliability have told ISG [the Iraq Survey Group] that Iraq did not have a large, ongoing centrally controlled CW [chemical weapons] program after 1991. … Iraq's large-scale capability to develop, produce, and fill new CW munitions was reduced—if not entirely destroyed—during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox [Clinton's 1998 airstrikes], 13 years of UN sanctions and UN inspections."...