George W. Bush
01-29-2004, 10:38 PM
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/388512.html
SOFIA - Iraq's foreign minister said on Thursday weapons of mass destruction acquired by the country's former rulers, which inspectors have failed to find, had been carefully hidden and he was confident they could be found.
"I have every belief that some of these weapons could be found as we move forward," Hoshiyar Zebari told a news conference in Sofia. "They have been hidden in certain areas. The system of hiding was very sophisticated."
The United States and Britain cited Iraq's alleged possession of chemical and biological arms as their main reason for invading Iraq last March and toppling Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government.
But no such weapons have so far come to light despite intensive searches. Former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said on Wednesday that "we were almost all wrong" about the issue and it was "highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons" in Iraq.
But Zebari, on a visit to Bulgaria, said: "We as Iraqis have seen Saddam Hussein develop, manufacture and use these weapons of mass destruction against us. He hasn't denied that."
Zebari, a Kurd, was apparently referring to the use of chemical weapons by Saddam's forces against Iraqi Kurdish villages in the late 1980s.
UN teams were sent into Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991 to scrap Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. Experts are divided on whether or not all the weapons were destroyed at that time.
SOFIA - Iraq's foreign minister said on Thursday weapons of mass destruction acquired by the country's former rulers, which inspectors have failed to find, had been carefully hidden and he was confident they could be found.
"I have every belief that some of these weapons could be found as we move forward," Hoshiyar Zebari told a news conference in Sofia. "They have been hidden in certain areas. The system of hiding was very sophisticated."
The United States and Britain cited Iraq's alleged possession of chemical and biological arms as their main reason for invading Iraq last March and toppling Saddam Hussein's Ba'athist government.
But no such weapons have so far come to light despite intensive searches. Former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said on Wednesday that "we were almost all wrong" about the issue and it was "highly unlikely that there were large stockpiles of deployed militarized chemical and biological weapons" in Iraq.
But Zebari, on a visit to Bulgaria, said: "We as Iraqis have seen Saddam Hussein develop, manufacture and use these weapons of mass destruction against us. He hasn't denied that."
Zebari, a Kurd, was apparently referring to the use of chemical weapons by Saddam's forces against Iraqi Kurdish villages in the late 1980s.
UN teams were sent into Iraq after the first Gulf War in 1991 to scrap Baghdad's weapons of mass destruction. Experts are divided on whether or not all the weapons were destroyed at that time.