Iraq and weapons of mass destruction
Iraq's military arsenal included weapons of mass destruction (biological and chemical) starting from 1960s, effectively ending with its near total destruction in the 1990s. Iraq used chemical weapons on multiple occasions, both domestically and in the war against Iran. After the first Gulf War in 1991, the UN Security Council required Iraq to eliminate its chemical, biological and previously unknown nuclear weapon programs under UN verification. Iraq was subsequently accused of having restarted its WMD programs, which was the principal justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq by the United States and a number of its allies.
The fifth president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein,[1] was internationally condemned for his use of chemical weapons during the 1980s campaign against Iranian and Kurdish civilians during and after the Iran–Iraq War. In the 1980s, Saddam pursued an extensive biological weapons program and a nuclear weapons program, though no nuclear bomb was built.
After the Persian Gulf War, the United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi chemical weapons and related equipment and materials throughout the early 1990s, with varying degrees of Iraqi cooperation and obstruction.[2] In response to diminishing Iraqi cooperation with UNSCOM, the United States called for withdrawal of all UN and IAEA inspectors in 1998, resulting in Operation Desert Fox. The 1999 disarmament report by UNSCOM listed large quantities of WMD material that was unaccounted for.[3]
The United States and the UK asserted that Saddam Hussein still possessed large hidden stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2003, and that he was clandestinely procuring and producing more. Inspections by the UN to resolve the status of unresolved disarmament questions restarted between November 2002 and March 2003,[4] under UN Security Council Resolution 1441, which demanded Saddam give "immediate, unconditional and active cooperation" with UN and IAEA inspections, shortly before his country was attacked.[5]
In March 2003 Chief inspector Hans Blix stated that Iraq had made "significant progress" toward resolving a number of key disarmament tasks, noting the "proactive" but not always "immediate" cooperation as called for by UN Security Council Resolution 1441. In the event of proactive Iraqi cooperation, he said it would take "but months" to resolve the key remaining disarmament tasks.[6] However, in his May 2003 report to the U.N., Blix said that his team had made "little progress" accounting for other materials which Iraq claims to have unilaterally destroyed.[7] The United States asserted this was a breach of Resolution 1441, but failed to convince the UN Security Council to pass a new resolution authorizing the use of force due to lack of evidence.[8][9][10]
Despite being unable to get a new resolution authorizing force and citing section 3 of the Joint Resolution passed by the U.S. Congress,[11] President George W. Bush asserted peaceful measures could not disarm Iraq of the weapons he alleged it to have and launched a second Gulf War. Later U.S.-led inspections found out that Iraq had earlier ceased active WMD production and stockpiling. The report also found that Iraq had worked covertly to maintain the intellectual and physical capacity to produce WMDs and intended to restart production once sanctions were lifted.[12]
In 2015 it was learned that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction had not been fully accounted for by UN inspections.[13] Ten years after its inception, Operation Avarice was declassified and it was learned that there were stockpiles of warheads and rockets containing degraded chemical agents similar to those used in the Iran-Iraq War. From 2005 through 2006 military intelligence discovered that the weapons—many in poor condition, some empty or containing nonlethal liquid, but others containing sarin with unexpectedly high purity—were in the possession of one Iraqi individual who remained anonymous. Operation Avarice, headed by army intelligence and the CIA, involved the discreet purchase of the weapons from the unidentified individual to keep them off the black market.[13]
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