[techweenie]

I think the issue here is that a person can hold two possibilities in his mind.

He thought through the mid-late '90s that he was close to finding WMDs. He was pissed when pulled off the job. The fact the Iraqis lied to him made him especially suspicious. But at the same time, he made it clear that one reason he wasn't finding WMDs could have been that there weren't any.

He wanted 'substantive proof', but proving a negative is particularly difficult. He now has that proof, in that all the intelligence he was relying on (and progressively came to distrust) pointed to programs and facilities that never existed.

The key phrase to understanding his thinking is this, from the Time article: "...I've said that no one has backed up any allegations that Iraq has reconstituted WMD capability with anything that remotely resembles substantive fact. To say that Saddam's doing it is in total disregard to the fact that if he gets caught he's a dead man and he knows it. Deterrence has been adequate in the absence of inspectors..."

The problem with this quote is that it seems to state more what he feels now than any of the contemporaneous quotes I found.

The best stuff is the 1998 fas.org quote, which is one I drew on. He indicates that there might be enough of several substances to fitt a couple dozen bombs or ballistic missle warheads. He then admits that wouldn't be much, but could serve as a 'seed program'. IOW, it wasn't so much what Saddam had, but what he might eventually have.

After all, anyone knows, several of the biologicals he mentioned didnt' have the shelf life to be toxic by 1998. And a couple dozen bombs with chemicals aren't a real threat to any target larger than a village.

Bottom line for me is that what Saddam had wasn't a threat to the U.S. To Iran? Maybe. To Israel? Possibly. He had rockets with a range of what? 600 miles?

Ritter didn't want the U.S. to attack Iraq. He didn't think anything there was threat enough to warrant attack. He just wanted to finish his inspections and continue monitoring. The weapons examples he used seemed to me more for the purpose of dramatizing the need for his continued employment.