This information was made public in the mid-1990’s by UN officials. UNSCOM chief scientist David Kay reported that Saddam had been only 12 to 18 months away from a workable nuclear bomb at the time we drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait in 1991. This became a lingering fear once Saddam again barred weapons inspectors from suspect sites in the late 1990’s; writers in The New York Times were vigilant in reminding us that Saddam must be perilously close to possessing that bomb.
A September 1998 article by Barton Gellman in the Washington Post reported “credible” evidence (from UN arms inspectors) that “Iraq has built and has maintained three or four ‘implosion devices’ that lack only cores of enriched uranium to make 20-kiloton nuclear weapons.”
An intriguing February 25, 2001 London Times feature went further, reporting that Saddam had actually secretly tested a nuclear weapon.
The Clinton administration had enough, and in December 1998 unleashed a flurry of cruise missiles at Iraqi sites. Still, Saddam would not relent. And by 2003, not a single weapons inspector had entered an Iraqi building in five years – a risk the president of the United States found unacceptable in a post-9/11 world.
This brings us to George W. Bush, and to my answer to the professor’s question: Indeed, George W. Bush did not have unmistakable evidence of stockpiles of Iraqi WMD, but neither did the UN in 1991 nor Bill Clinton in 1998. Bush knew what they knew: Saddam had a rich history of manufacturing and using these weapons, and then lying about and hiding their existence.
Yes, there’s a liar in this story, all right. His name is Saddam Hussein.