Many will remember the famous presentation of the Secretary of State at the time, Colin Powell, before the UN Security Council shortly before the invasion in February 2003, in which he supported the American intervention, continues EFE. Some time had passed since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the US was afraid of a new terrorist attack by Al Qaeda, which at the time Washington linked to the regime of Saddam Hussein, although it could not be more wrong. In his presentation, Powell used data that intelligence officials had assured him was credible: photographs, maps, and wiretaps of high-ranking Iraqi commanders. The reports that the foreign minister had were based on the testimonies of Iraqi defectors “of little trust”, Duelfer pointed out, which the US investigated with some skepticism, but not “enough”. The fact is that the US knew for sure that Iraq had used weapons of mass destruction during the war with Iran (1980–1988). Duelfer’s involvement in Iraq dates back to when he was a State Department military and political official and the US supported Saddam Hussein’s government with intelligence and economic support. “It would not be an exaggeration to say that chemical weapons played a major role in saving his regime in that long and bloody conflict,” Duelfer said. With the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq and the imposition of international sanctions on the regime in 1991, Baghdad ran out of weapons of mass destruction, and UN inspections began. In the 1990s, Duelfer was, in fact, the only high-ranking American official who spoke regularly with the Iraqi government through his work at UNSCOM. Both that mission and the International Atomic Energy Agency and Iraq Inspection Group (ISG), run by the CIA after the invasion to look for weapons of mass destruction, concluded that they did not exist. Duelfer led the 1,700-person ISG and drafted its final report. It didn’t take long for the USA to realize the error it had committed after entering the country. The climax was the publication of the so-called “Duelfer report” in late September 2004, which, while acknowledging that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, emphasized that Saddam Hussein intended to recover them as soon as sanctions were lifted. Probably the dictator’s biggest miscalculation was that he did not condemn the attacks of September 11, 2001, a fact interpreted by Washington as an indication that he had ties to Al Qaeda, although Saddam “hated” the terrorist organization. In fact, starting in 2000, the Iraqis sought a rapprochement with the US through Duelfer, which never materialized. But how did Saddam view the American WMD blunder? According to the expert, the dictator had a distorted view of reality because his entourage did not dare, out of fear, tell him the truth. This could be seen by Duelfer during the interrogations of Saddam Hussein, after his arrest in December 2003, to which he was a privileged witness, although he was never face-to-face with him in the room because he decided as one person, FBI agent George Piro, to carry out this task. To get close to him, they adopted a psychological strategy rather than a violent one. “He wanted to outline his legacy, so part of our interrogation strategy was to give him an opportunity to write it down,” recalled Duelfer, who explained that Saddam Hussein understood that part of his problem when he ran Iraq was that no one was telling him the truth. The dictator was “perplexed” and did not understand how the US could attack his country, believing it possessed weapons of mass destruction. As Duelfer pointed out, when Washington launched those accusations, the Iraqis could not conceive that the US “had no idea” what was happening in their country but believed that they were doing it for a specific reason or for “political purposes.”

By Paul Bumman