The official, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs John Bolton, spoke here at a luncheon hosted by the National Defense University Foundation.
Explicitly addressing the lack of WMD stocks found in Iraq so far, Bolton said, “There has been a lot of misunderstanding as to exactly what it was we expected to find and when we expected to find it.”
Since the first Gulf War, he said, “The most fundamental, most important thing that was not destroyed [by international weapons inspectors] was the intellectual capacity in Iraq to recreate systems of weapons of mass destruction.”
Bolton said U.N. and International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors “could have inspected for years and years and years and probably never would have found weapons-grade plutonium or weapons-grade uranium.”
“But right in front of them was the continued existence of what Saddam Hussein called the ‘nuclear mujahadeen,’ the thousand or so scientists, technicians, people who have in their own heads and in their files the intellectual property necessary at an appropriate time … to recreate a nuclear weapons program.”
Bolton said the United States was justified in attacking Iraq because of that alleged capacity.
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