Q. Up to now, 19 days after the invasion, there has been no trace of biological and chemical weapons. The American special forces state that this is because they are stored in Baghdad. Do you believe this?
A. United States as well as the United Kingdom always told us that Iraq possessed those weapons. We never accepted this statement as an established fact. Establishing this was exactly what our work consisted of. Sadly, both Governments were seen to be very impatient in the first days of March. And they did not leave us to finish the task. A few months were need for us to determine if the Iraqi possessed the arms the Americans and British insisted they had. I am very curious to know if they are really going to find them. I believe that no one has more interest in this than I...
Q. In 1998 when the former inspector, Richard Butler, decided to withdraw the inspection team from Iraq. Wasn't it because the American intelligence agents were accompanying the inspectors of the UN Disarmament Agency (Unscom)?
A. In fact, I was in the International Atomic Energy Agency then. But there was that problem. The intelligence agents seemed to be collecting data that later were used to attack Iraqi military objectives. Therefore, when I was charged with the inspection effort, it was necessary to clarify the point: we would be an independent body. We would be able to receive information from the intelligence services. But this process would be a one way street. The intelligence services would contribute their data. And we would perform the verification of that data. I always told them that we were not going to reward them with new data collected by us. The greatest prize for those intelligence services and their Governments would be for us to find those weapons of mass destruction, not to stop speaking with them. For example, to give them an idea whether the sources that had provided the information were valid or not. But that was all. This attitude did not please them. Our conduct was justified. Consider the case of the production of contracts for a presumed Iraqi purchase of enriched uranium from Níger. This was a crude lie. All false...
Q. Did you do everything possible to determine the existence of those arms??
A. I have a tranquil conscience. I regret not to have had the months that were needed to confirm whether the biological and chemical weapons existed or not. But the Americans began to express their impatience by the first of March. It seems that as soon as the hot weather arrived in Iraq, the attacks were unleashed. However, when you asked them, the Americans wouldnt allow any more time for the inspections. When on January 27, I denounced Iraq in the Security Council of the UN for not cooperating in an immediate, complete and unconditional way to fulfill the terms of resolution 1441, the American Government, including the hawks, applauded me. However, it was a great paradox, because from then on, the Government of Iraq began to cooperate actively. And then the Americans began to criticize me.
Q. When you speak of active cooperation, are you referring to the destruction of a portion of the Al Samud missles?
A. The destruction of those missiles was the Iraqi government's answer to my ultimatum. I am referring to other things as well. The Iraqis gave us the names of many technicians and scientists who had participated in the development of biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction in 1991. This was fundamental, because at first, for example, they only provided us samples of land where anthrax had presumably been buried. But, of course, it was difficult to draw conclusions by just examining a piece of land. You would never know what quantities of anthrax had been buried. In conclusion, the Iraqis had not complied with the demand to give us the immediate data that was needed, as was evident in resolution 1441, but by the end of January they began to give us significant data, before the 200.000 British and American soldiers were deployed in the Persian Gulf. We needed some months to work on it.
Q. Was the Bush Administration really interested in the inspections? It seems that they were not going to use them, since there is very concrete evidence that the invasion was planned considerably in advance?
A. There is evidence that this war was planned far in advance. That, at times, caused doubts regarding the attitude that they Americans maintained before the inspections. But I remember that President Bush called myself and Mohammed al-Baradei, the Director of the International Atomic Energy Agency to the White House in October 2002. Vice-president Richard Cheney, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defense, were with him. That told us that support for the process of inspection had begun. In that moment I did not see impatience. Of course, I knew that inside the Bush Administration there were people who were skeptical, and already working with the idea of regime change. But at that time I believed that there was some margin for the action of the inspectors.
Q. When did you begin to feel that you would have little more to do?
A. I think that I felt that, as I have just said, when the Iraqis began to work more actively to fulfill of the terms of resolution 1441, after I denounced their lack of cooperation on , January 27. Seeing the impatience of the Americans I had the sensation that the situation was exhausted. And when, by March 7, the British said that they were willing to relax the initial ultimatum set for March 17 by only for four or five days, I knew that was the end.
