Iraq forced to pay $10 billion per year for WMD search
Iraq has been forced to pay US$10 billion a year to the US-led team searching for weapon's of mass destruction, even after it emerged that such stockpiles did not exist, a US Congressional report has found.
The Iraq: Post-Saddam Governance and Security report by the Congressional Report Service notes that The formal US-led WMD search ended December 2004 but the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) is still formally active.
A draft resolution was only circulated this month to end UNMOVIC's work, which costs US $10 billion per year
drawn from Iraqi revenues.
The report notes that The primary theme in the Bush Administration’s public case for the need to confront Iraq was that Iraq posted a “grave and gathering” threat that should be blunted before the threat became urgent.
President Bush in an October 2002 speech in Cincinnati, asserted that Iraq had worked to rebuild its WMD programs in the nearly four years since UN weapons inspectors left Iraq and had failed to comply with 16 UN previous resolutions that demanded complete elimination of all of Iraq’s WMD programs.
He also stated that that Iraq could transfer its WMD to terrorists, particularly Al Qaeda, for use in potentially catastrophic attacks in the United States.
Bush disregarded the critics who noted that, under the US threat of retaliation, Iraq did not use WMD against US troops in the 1991 Gulf war.
A “comprehensive” September 2004 report of the Iraq Survey Group, known as the “Duelfer report,”13 found no WMD stockpiles or production but said that there was evidence that the regime retained the intention to reconstitute WMD programs in the future.
