Beyond Investor's Business Daily's editorial, conservative bloggers and chain e-mails have claimed that the Associated Press report proves that President Bush was right in the run-up to the Iraq war when he said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. One e-mail a reader forwarded to us said this was "vindication for the Bush administration." It's not. The AP article, published on July 5, said that a large amount of yellowcake uranium was, in fact, sold by Iraq to Canada, as part of a secret mission facilitated by the U.S. But this uranium was known to have been in Iraq following the conclusion of the first Gulf War. It was not "found" in 2003, as the IBD editorial claims. As the AP article said, "There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, [a senior U.S. official] |
It should be pointed out (as I've been forced to several times around the web) that yellowcake is not WMD. In fact, it's not even refined.
The piece goes on:
The piece goes on:
But this particular stock of uranium was not recently discovered — and it was no secret. It had been stored in sealed containers, since before the first Gulf War, according to the AP. Saddam Hussein was forced to allow United Nations inspectors into Iraq in 1991, as part of the cease-fire that ended the first Gulf War. The U.N. Security Council's agreement required Hussein to dismantle Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, in exchange for lifting the 1990 economic sanctions imposed on Iraq. The inspectors monitored Iraq's disarmament, and later guarded this uranium.
More recently, U.S. and Iraqi forces have been guarding it, since Iraqis looted the site after Hussein’s fall from power.
