Prior to the war, the IAEA had certified that Hussein’s cooperation with the agency was “exemplary.”3 So inspectors were shocked to discover after the war that they had been completely duped. By some estimates, Iraq had been just a year away from having enough fissile material to produce a nuclear bomb and two to three years away from having a full-scale nuclear arsenal.
This is the first gulf war. And might explain a bit how a decade later Cheney, Bush W, Rumsfeld could have been so certain that Iraq was developing wmd even though they could find no direct evidence? Because of his similar thinking, why I fear Bolton so much.
