Word: duelfer
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...mosque to resemble the Scud missiles he fired at Israel during the Gulf War. These things give concrete expression--literally--to his central ambition: to be remembered and revered as the leader who restored Iraq and the Arab world generally to their rightful glory. He considers himself, says Charles Duelfer, the former deputy executive chairman of the U.N. weapons-inspection team in Iraq, "the incarnation of the destiny of the Arab people...
...nuclear development have had to rely on interviews with recent defectors and surveys of suppliers Baghdad has contacted seeking parts. Both suggest that Iraq's nuclear program is back in full swing. "Iraq's known nuclear scientists are gravitating to the country's five nuclear research sites," says Charles Duelfer, who was the second-ranking official on the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) on Iraq until it was disbanded in 1999. "That doesn't appear to be coincidental...
Experts including Duelfer and Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, believe Saddam has the sophisticated triggers, weapon housings and everything else he needs to build a nuclear device--except for a sufficient supply of weapons-grade enriched uranium. Intelligence indicates that he is angling to obtain some on the international black market, but it's not something that your friendly neighborhood arms smuggler can lay hands on right away. So Saddam also is working to enrich his own uranium. That's a major technological challenge, but Iraq is expected to succeed...
Intelligence about Iraq's capabilities on these fronts is firmer and no less frightening. "We destroyed a lot of chemical weapons," says Duelfer of the U.N. inspection team. "They had a facility that was going night and day, like some weird James Bond movie." Inspectors discovered and disposed of 38,500 chemical munitions (such as shells, warheads, bombs), 690 tons of chemical weapons agents, 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals and 426 pieces of chemical production equipment. But Iraq never accounted for all the 100,000 chemical weapons it produced for use in the Iran-Iraq war, and there...
...While restoring inspections makes tactical sense for Saddam, it's not that easy for a dictator who believes his weapons of mass destruction are the key to his survival. In recent congressional testimony, former U.N. inspection official Charles Duelfer recalled a chilling 1995 discussion with Iraqi officials in which he was told that Iraq had loaded chemical and biological weapons in missiles and bombs in 1991 and issued standing orders to fire them if U.S. troops moved on Baghdad. "The Iraqis stated that these actions apparently deterred the United States from going to Baghdad," said Duelfer. Saddam believed...