WASHINGTON, 25 January 2004 — US Secretary of State Colin Powell said yesterday it was an “open question” whether stocks of weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq and conceded it was possible Saddam Hussein had none.
Powell made the comments one day after David Kay, the leader of the US hunt for banned weapons in Iraq, stepped down and said he did not believe there were any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons in the country.
“The open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go. And if they didn’t have any, then why wasn’t that known beforehand?” Powell said to reporters as he flew to Tbilisi to attend today’s inauguration of Georgian President-elect Mikhail Saakashvili.
Undercutting the White House’s public rationale for the war on Iraq, Kay told Reuters by telephone shortly after stepping down from his post on Friday that he had concluded there were no such stockpiles to be found.
“I don’t think they existed,” Kay said. “What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ‘90s,” he said.
“I think we have found probably 85 percent of what we’re going to find,” said Kay, who returned from Iraq in December and told the CIA that he would not be going back.
“I think the best evidence is that they did not resume large-scale production and that’s what we’re really talking about,” Kay said.
The United Nations’ top nuclear watchdog said yesterday he was not surprised at Kay’s conclusion.
“I am not surprised about this,” International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed El-Baradei told Reuters on the sidelines of the Davos meeting.
“We said already before the war, that there was no evidence of this, so this is really not a surprise.”
Kay’s statements are certain to reopen debate in the United States — particularly among the field of Democratic candidates vying for the right to take on Bush in November — about the administration’s motives for launching the war.
In London, where Prime Minister Tony Blair is a steadfast Bush ally in the war despite its unpopularity with many British voters, Kay’s admission of defeat on the weapons front marked a potential setback.
Blair’s office issued a statement shrugging off his comments. “It is important people are patient and we let the Iraq Survey Group do its work,” a spokesman said.
“There is still more work to be done and we await the findings of that. But our position is unchanged.”
