Scoop on Iraq nukes not as exciting as CNN wants it to be

CNN is really excited about a new report highlighting the discovery of nuclear technology parts found in Iraq. To hear CNN tell it, this is a major development in our post-war efforts, but a closer look at the “special report” reveals that the news is not quite what it appears.

An Iraqi nuclear scientist, Mahdi Obeidi, has led U.S. investigators to hidden parts and documents relating to a nuclear bomb program, which Obeidi buried under his rose garden 12 years ago. More specifically, Obeidi had hid parts of a uranium centrifuge system needed to develop nuclear weapons. As CNN explained, “centrifuges are drums or cylinders that spin at high speed and separate heavy and light molecules, allowing increasingly enriched uranium to be drawn off.”

But CNN does hint at a critically important point: “The gas centrifuge equipment dates to Iraq’s pre-1991 efforts to build nuclear weapons.”

And that’s why this isn’t a huge story. Saddam Hussein wanted a nuclear weapons program. We already knew that. He tried to develop one before the first Gulf War. We already knew that too. He took rudimentary steps towards developing a nuclear program in the 1980s, which we then destroyed in 1991.

Some may look at the CNN report and think that it lends credence to the Bush administration’s claims that Hussein’s government was working on a nuclear weapons program. But the report proves no such thing; it actually suggests the opposite.

Obeidi even told U.S. officials that he hadn’t done any work on a nuclear program since 1991. CNN reported that he hid these components with the understanding that he could dig them up “as soon as the world was no longer looking.”

But U.N. weapons inspectors were gone from Iraq in 1998 and didn’t return until this year, yet the components were left untouched under Mr. Obeidi’s roses. If the White House was right, and Iraq was actively pursuing an active nuclear program, Obeidi’s hidden treasure wouldn’t have remained underground after weapons inspectors were gone.

Could Hussein’s government, if left in tact, come back at some future date to try again to develop a nuclear program? Sure, but that isn’t at all what the Bush administration was claiming to be the case in the months before our recent invasion.

In making the case for war, Bush said Hussein “is moving ever closer to developing a nuclear weapon.” The CNN report doesn’t bolster this claim; it suggests Hussein wasn’t close at all.

Dick Cheney said in March that the administration believes that Iraq “has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons.” This claim was also completely untrue, and the CNN report only reinforces how very wrong Cheney was.

No one should be fooled into thinking that this discovery somehow justifies the war or lends credibility to the administration’s claims about the imminent danger posed by Hussein’s government. It does neither.