Review Khidhir Hamza, Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda, Scribner, 2000

  

Before the 2003 invasion Khidhir Hamza was one of the leading Iraqis in America warning of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and advocating for war. He regularly appeared in the media. In 2001 he told PBS’s Frontline that Iraq only needed a nuclear core to build an atomic bomb. In 2002 he gave a presentation to the Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about Iraq’s nuclear weapons program. He told the latter that Iraq had enough uranium to build three bombs by 2005 if it was enriched. At the end of that year his claims were used in a speech by President George Bush as part of the public relations campaign to win support for the invasion. His story was first published in 2000 in Saddam’s Bombmaker, The Terrifying Inside Story Of The Iraqi Nuclear And Biological Weapons Agenda. He turned out to be a fraud.

Review Edited by Paul Cornish, The Conflict In Iraq, 2003, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004

  

The Conflict In Iraq is an anthology with chapters by various authors connected to the Center for Defense Studies at King’s College London. Like any collection some of the chapters are quite good and others are not. The fact that the book was put together very early in the U.S. occupation of Iraq also makes some of the readings outdated. Still there are some important insights provided such as comparisons between the British and Americans times in Iraq, the war planning, and United Nations weapons inspections.

Review Mahdi Obeidi and Kurt Pitzer, The Bomb In My Garden, The Secrets Of Saddam’s Nuclear Mastermind, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2004

  

In The Bomb In My Garden Dr Mahdi Obeidi tells the story of how Iraq tried to produce a nuclear bomb in the early 1990s. He was in charge of building centrifuges to enrich uranium. He goes through Iraq’s nuclear ambitions, how they covertly worked to gain the know-how and technology, how United Nations inspectors dismantled the program and then how the U.S. bungled its search for WMD after the 2003 invasion.

Review Tim Trevan, Saddam’s Secrets: The Hunt For Iraq’s Hidden Weapons, Harper Collins, 1999

  

Tim Trevan was a British expert in weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In 1992 he joined the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspectors in Iraq. His Saddam’s Secrets is one of the better books on the subject. He goes into great detail about all of the jobs the inspectors carried out but focuses upon the biological weapons program which Iraq tried to hide. It’s the coverage of each inspection team that went to Iraq that reveals how Baghdad lied about its program until UNSCOM ended in 1998.

Review Raid On The Sun, Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam The Bomb

Claire, Rodger, Raid On The Sun, Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam The Bomb, Broadway Books, 2004

 

Rodger Claire’s Raid on The Sun, Inside Israel’s Secret Campaign That Denied Saddam The Bomb is about the 1981 raid upon Iraq’s nuclear reactor. The government of PM Menachem Begin was convinced that Iraq was only a few years away from getting a nuclear bomb and decided to stop the program with an air strike. The author mainly focuses upon the Israeli decision making and then the pilots. Unfortunately the author relied upon an Iraqi defector for much of the information about Iraq’s program and was misled as a result.

Chilcot Inquiry Section 4.2 Iraq WMD Assessments, July to September 2002

2002 was when the U.K.’s assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction dramatically changed. British intelligence became more assertive about Iraq producing WMD and restarting its nuclear weapons program despite the sources being very sketchy. This was topped off by the Blair government’s dossier on Iraq which had headline grabbing claims such as Iraq being able to deploy WMD in 45 minutes. This kicked off London’s information campaign to win support for war.

Chilcot Inquiry Section 4.1 Iraq WMD Assessments, Pre-July 2002

Early British assessments of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction were almost exactly the same as the Americans. In the 1990s to the early 2000s the U.K. assumed that Iraq still had its WMD and wanted to expand its programs. It also felt that Baghdad would always hide what it was doing. Just like the U.S. the threat assessments also gradually increased.

Review The WMD Mirage, Iraq’s Decade of Deception and America’s False Premise for War

Whitney, Craig, Editor, The WMD Mirage, Iraq’s Decade of Deception and America’s False Premise for War, New York: Public Affairs, 2005

 

The WMD Mirage, Iraq’s Decade of Deception and America’s False Premise for War contains primary documents on the U.S.’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and nuclear program. It starts with what the Bush administration thought Iraq was doing, then covers the reports by the United Nations’ inspectors, and finally ends with the various investigations into America’s pre-Iraq war intelligence on Iraq. It is packed full of information but it gets monotonous in the last third of the book because many of the same points are covered over and over. Still, this is an important collection because it shows not only what the White House was saying but U.S. intelligence as well and how utterly wrong they were. In the process it disproves some common myths about the U.S. case for war.

Review Hoodwinked, The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War

Review Prados, John, Hoodwinked, The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War, New York: The New Press, 2004

Like many books released immediately in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq Hoodwinked, The Documents That Reveal How Bush Sold Us a War focuses upon the case the Bush administration made to justify war rather than why it happened. The 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations and other speeches and documents are all analyzed to explain the public campaign the White House launched in the run up to the conflict. The problems with U.S. intelligence and the arguments for war are emphasized. Despite lots of information on those topics coming out after the book was published, Hoodwinked is still a good starting point to understand how the White House sold the invasion.

Iraq’s Rejection Of UN Inspectors Led To Mistrust Over WMD And 2003 Invasion

(AP)

In January 2006 the Central Intelligence Agency released a review of how Iraq dealt with the United Nations’ weapons inspections in the 1990s and 2000s. It came to the conclusion that Iraq’s early deception campaign forever shaped how western governments and intelligence agencies perceived Iraq. That meant in 1995 when Iraq tried to come clean about its weapons programs and in the 2000s when it thought it was cooperating with a new inspections regime, it was still thought of as a country that was hiding its weapons of mass destruction.

Chilcot Report Section 1.2 UK Iraq strategy September 2000 To September 2001

Section 1.2 of the Chilcot Report discussed the difficulties the United Kingdom ran into trying to maintain its containment policy on Iraq. First, the international community and Arab states were losing interesting in Iraq, so it was more difficult to maintain sanctions against it. Second, elements in the new Bush administration were talking about removing Saddam as soon as they entered office. Despite that, London mistakenly believed that it could continue with its Iraq strategy.

Chilcot Report Sec 1.1 UK Iraq Strategy 1990 To 2000

The Chilcott Inquiry was created to explain the decisions that led to England’s participation in the Iraq War. The first section covered the United Kingdom’s strategy towards Iraq from the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to 2000. London’s main concern during this period all the way to 2003 was Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and nuclear programs. British intelligence believed that Iraq was close to getting a nuclear bomb and had a large and active chemical and biological weapons arsenal. After the Gulf War, the UK committed itself to a containment policy that backed United Nations’ inspectors to destroy Iraq’s weapons programs and a no fly zone to deter any further aggression. This set the stage for Downing Streets’ Iraq strategy all the way up to 2003.

Review The Saddam Tapes, The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978-2001

Review Woods, Kevin, Palkki, David, and Stout, Mark, The Saddam Tapes, The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978-2001, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi, Tokyo, Mexico City: Cambridge University Press, 2011

The Saddam Tapes, The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime 1978-2001 was the first book to use the wealth of captured documents and tapes seized after the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The book specifically focuses upon recordings of Saddam and his top advisers, usually at meetings of the Revolutionary Command Council or cabinet. Those tapes both confirm and dispel many of the stereotypes built up about Saddam over all the years he was in power. For example, he considered himself an expert on all kinds of affairs even if he didn't really know about them, he believed in conspiracies about the United States and Jews-Israel, but he was not a madman and he was not surrounded by a bunch of yes men. While his inner circle did not always pass along bad news there was actually lively debate and long discussions on most issues. While the transcripts do not all invoke the same interest, they do provide a first hand and inside account of Saddam’s government.

Iraq, One Of The Worst Intelligence Failures In US History

In the run up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq there were a few that questioned U.S. claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. It was only afterward that no WMD was discovered and official inquiries were made that the true extent of this failure was known. American intelligence agencies assumed that Baghdad had restarted its nuclear and WMD programs after U.N. inspectors left in the late 1990s and by the 2000s were looking for reports to confirm their suspicions rather than basing their opinions off of what they collected.

How U.S. Intelligence Created An Iraqi Nuclear Threat In 2002

In 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency said that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons program. This was a change from its previous opinion that Baghdad had retained elements of its program, but it had not been reactivated. The Agency suffered from poor analysis and exaggeration to make its argument, and in retrospect should have never made those claims.

How A Contested Aluminum Tubes Story Became The Basis For War With Iraq

The Bush administration’s first public relations campaign to lobby for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was centered around the claim that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. This was based upon Baghdad trying to buy 60,000 aluminum tubes in 2001. The October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq used the tubes to claim that Iraq had renewed its atomic program. The problem was this story was always contested, especially by the Energy Department and nuclear specialists, while just one CIA analyst was able to get this claim propagated by the White House.

How US Intelligence Failed, The Iraq-Niger Uranium Story

Within the U.S. intelligence community that story that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger was never very important. It was a considered a secondary claim to other reports that Iraq had restarted its nuclear program. It would later become a huge controversy when it was included in the president’s 2003 State of the Union address, and then Vice President Dick Cheney tried to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson who disputed the story. That embarrassing episode was only the public face of a larger example of the intelligence failure America suffered from in the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

When The World Remembered It Armed The New Hitler Saddam

In the lead up to the 1991 Gulf War President George Bush began comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler. According to the president both men invaded their neighbors and ran cruel dictatorships. The inconvenient truth was that the U.S. and its allies wanted closer ties with Iraq for decades seeing it as an important Middle East power. As part of that policy the West sold Iraq the agents, technology and know how to build its chemical, biological, and nuclear programs. In the wake of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 these was a new round of reporting on just how eager the West was to arm the dictator it was now denouncing.

France was Iraq’s second largest arms supplier. While most of its tanks and small arms came from Russia, Baghdad liked to purchase its high-tech equipment from France. In 1975 Saddam who was then Iraq’s vice president made his first overseas trip to Paris to sign an arms contract. (1) From 1975-1987 France sold Baghdad 135 Mirage fighters jets, 140 helicopters, 200 AMX tanks, 900 Panhard armored cars, 1,800 Milan anti-tank missiles, 900 Exocent air to ground missiles and other equipment. Eventually, 1/3 of Paris’ arms exports were going to Iraq. France was also involved in Iraq’s nuclear program signing a deal in 1976 to provide a nuclear reactor, which was capable of producing plutonium from a bomb. Successive French governments thought selling weapons to Iraq was important to gain influence in the Middle East. It was so intent upon building this relationship that it had no problem advancing Iraq’s nuclear program.

The United States had an arms embargo on Iraq during the 1980s, but that didn’t stop it from exporting dual use equipment to Baghdad. During the Iran-Iraq War the U.S. decided to improve relations with Baghdad out of fear of Iran. In November 1984 the Reagan administration restored full diplomatic relations with Saddam’s government. (2) From 1985-1990 Iraq bought $730 million worth of high-tech goods that were used for Iraq’s nuclear, missiles, and chemical and biological warfare programs. One such example was American Type Culture Collection, which sent anthrax and four other viruses to Iraq. (3) The U.S. provided software that was used to develop Iraq’s Super Gun, technology and glass fiber for missiles, along with parts and equipment for its uranium enrichment program and centrifuges used to develop nuclear weapons. (4) During the Iran-Iraq War Washington had no problem with Iraq working on these programs as it wanted a counter weight to Iran. By the time of the Gulf War however, these programs were seen as a major threat to the region and America’s allies there.

Germany was another major contributor to Iraq’s WMD and nuclear programs. It was reported that German firms provided Iraq with 90% of its chemical weapons capabilities. (5) Plalto-Kuehn G.m.b.H. sold agents that were used in biological research. (6) Karl Kolb became the chief supplier of agents to produce nerve and mustard gas. It also helped build plants, which it claimed were for pesticide, but an investigation revealed that the company knew they were for WMD all along. Water Engineering Trading provided parts for the Muthanna facility that was Iraq’s largest WMD factory, and also helped build a nerve gas plant in Fallujah. (7) In 1987 it signed a deal to send 100 technicians to help with the facility. Gildemeister Projects, Messerschmitt-Boelkow-Blohm, and H&H Metalform all helped build the Saad 16 plant that worked on both chemical and nuclear weapons. Saarstahl sold special metals to Iraq for its centrifuges, H&H Metalform sold lathes cut from special steel from, and magnets came from Inwako all for its nuclear program. (8) Iraq began its chemical, biological, and nuclear programs in the 1970s. It was completely dependent upon foreign know how and technology to develop them. Germany was one of the largest providers for all of those needs.

Without the West Iraq’s nuclear and WMD programs would not have been possible. It provided almost all of the raw materials to build these programs. When the Iran-Iraq War concluded in 1988 many of these ties were exposed, but Europe and the U.S. were more interested in seeking better ties with Saddam. When Iraq invaded Kuwait that all changed, and Iraq’s chemical, biological, and nuclear programs were part of the reason why Saddam was considered so dangerous. The media once again brought up that they were only possible due to the help of the west, but like in the 80s that didn’t seem to matter.

FOOTNOTES

1. Kaplan, Bernard, “Arms deals return to haunt the French,” San Francisco Examiner, 9/7/90

2. Gugliotta, Guy, Babcock, Charles and Weiser, Benjamin, “The Ties That Blind,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 9/24-30/90

3. Bradsher, Keith, “Senator Says U.S. Allowed Export Of Lethal Viruses to Iraq in 80’s,” New York Times, 2/10/94

4. Sinai, Ruth, “Saddam arsenal got a lot from U.S.,” Associated Press, 11/1/92

5. Smolowe, Jill, “Who Armed Baghdad?” Time, 2/11/91

6. Kempe, Frederick, “Supplying Saddam Germans Had Big Role In Helping Iraq Arm, Internal Report Shows,” Wall Street Journal, 10/2/90

7. Pletka, Danielle, “Firms Sell Saddam, Qaddafi the Deadly Means to an End,” Insight, 11/26/90

8. Reichlin, Igor and Maremont, Mark with Kapstein, Jonathan, Levine, Jonathan, “Iraq’s Silent Allies In Its Quest For The Bomb,” Business Week, 1/14/91

SOURCES

American Experience, “The Persian Gulf War”

Borger, Gloria and Hedges, Stephen with Stanglin, Douglas, “When the enemy is us,” U.S. News & World Report, 2/18/91

Bradsher, Keith, “Senator Says U.S. Allowed Export Of Lethal Viruses to Iraq in 80’s,” New York Times, 2/10/94

Ehrmann, Eric and Barton, Christopher, “Who Helped Arm Saddam?” Christian Science Monitor, 1/29/91

Gugliotta, Guy, Babcock, Charles and Weiser, Benjamin, “The Ties That Blind,” Washington Post National Weekly Edition, 9/24-30/90

Kaplan, Bernard, “Arms deals return to haunt the French,” San Francisco Examiner, 9/7/90

Kempe, Frederick, “Supplying Saddam Germans Had Big Role In Helping Iraq Arm, Internal Report Shows,” Wall Street Journal, 10/2/90

New York Times, “How Iraq blazes a trail to nukes,” Sacramento Bee, 12/23/90

Pletka, Danielle, “Firms Sell Saddam, Qaddafi the Deadly Means to an End,” Insight, 11/26/90

Reichlin, Igor and Maremont, Mark with Kapstein, Jonathan, Levine, Jonathan, “Iraq’s Silent Allies In Its Quest For The Bomb,” Business Week, 1/14/91

Sinai, Ruth, “Saddam arsenal got a lot from U.S.,” Associated Press, 11/1/92

Smolowe, Jill, “Who Armed Baghdad?” Time, 2/11/91

HISTORY CHANNEL VIDEO: Israeli Airstrike On Iraqi Nuclear Reactor 1981

BBC VIDEO: The Spies Who Fooled The World