This article concerns the Iraqi government's use, possession, and alleged intention of acquiring more types of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) during the presidency of Saddam Hussein. During his reign of several decades, he was internationally known for his use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against civilians and in the IranIraq War. Following the 1991 Gulf War he also engaged in a decade-long confrontation with the United Nations and its weapons inspectors, which ended in the 2003 invasion by the United States.
The United Nations located and destroyed large quantities of Iraqi WMD throughout the early 1990s, with varying degrees of Iraqi cooperation and obstruction.[1] Washington withdrew weapons inspectors in 1998, resulting in Operation Desert Fox. The United States and the UK asserted that Saddam Hussein still possessed large hidden stockpiles of WMD in 2003, and that he was clandestinely procuring and producing more. Inspections by the U.N. restarted from November 2002 until March 2003,[2] but hadn't turned up any evidence of actual WMDs when the United States and the "Coalition of the Willing" invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein in March 2003.
Great controversy emerged when no stockpiles of WMDs were found, leading to accusations that the United States, its President George W. Bush in particular, had deliberately inflated intelligence or lied about Iraq's weapons in order to justify an invasion of the country. The non-profit and non-partisan Center for Public Integrity asserted President Bush's administration made a total of 935 false statements between 2001 and 2003 about Iraq's alleged threat to the United States.[3]While various inert, leftover WMDs and weapons components from the 1980s and 1990s have been found, most weapons inspectors now believe that Iraq's chemical weapons program ceased production after 1991.
