From J.E. Dyer, on Daniel Halper:
The public narrative on this is probably too well entrenched to ever be dislodged. But, once again, whatever it is you believed about Saddam and WMD, US intelligence did NOT believe Saddam had the stockpiles of mushroom-cloud producing warheads evoked by Colin Powell’s UN speech.
US intelligence believed Saddam had two basic things: an undetermined number of former-Soviet chemical rounds on-hand, along with an undetermined number of battlefield rockets and short-medium-range missiles to deliver them (the inventory never accounted for by UN inspectors); and a group of WMD programs. The WMD programs were believed to include nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs, along with the ballistic missile program to provide warhead delivery. Saddam was thought to have dual-use factories which could rapidly be converted from commercial production or research to WMD production. As stated repeatedly by President Bush, the concern about Saddam and these programs was the ease with which he might supply the quantities of WMD sufficient for terrorist attacks (which could be very small) to groups like Al Qaeda.
After the war, what we found — in spite of the months Saddam had had available to move items out of the country, whether you believe he did or not — was:
– More than former-Soviet 500 chemical rounds
– Documentation and pieces/parts of Saddam’s ballistic missile programs, including development of missiles with longer range than allowed by the UN sanctions
– A number of tons of partially enriched uranium (the precise number has not been reported to the public, and Canada accepted the uranium after the war), retained from the 1980s in defiance of UN sanctions
– Blueprints for a uranium-enrichment centrifuge, and documentation (see the Duelfer Report) of Saddam’s continuing retention of scientists, infrastructure, foreign contacts, and a funding line for a nuclear weapons program
– Containers of the chemical toxins sarin, VX, and mustard gas
– Documentation of the intended dual use of chemical factories for weapon production
What we found after the war largely validated our pre-war estimates. Those who insist otherwise simply don’t know what they are talking about.