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Intelligence Committee. “Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region,” she said, “and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspections process.” A number of senators, including Democrats John Kerry, Carl Levin, and Tom Daschle, wrote to President Clinton urging that he “take necessary actions (including, if appropriate, air and missile strikes on suspect Iraqi sites) to respond effectively to the threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to end its weapons of mass destruction programs.” Senator Joe Biden, writing in the Washington Post two months before the strikes, noted the limitation of any policy that left Saddam in power. “Ultimately, as long as Saddam Hussein is at the helm, no inspectors can guarantee that they have rooted out the entirety of Saddam Hussein’s weapons program,” he wrote, and he observed that “the only way to remove Saddam is a massive military effort, led by the United States.”

Saddam Hussein did not find Desert Fox persuasive. In 1999 he began firing on U.S. and British planes that were enforcing the no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq. The United States together with the United Kingdom and France had established the zones to prevent Saddam from oppressing the Kurds in the north and the Shia in the south. Meanwhile, as we would later learn, Saddam was using the oil-for-food program, intended for the people of Iraq, to enrich himself, bribe others, and purchase improvements for facilities that had the potential to be used for WMD development.

In 1999 the U.S. intelligence community assessed that Saddam had revitalized his biological weapons program. In 2000 a National Intelligence Estimate on worldwide biological weapons threats contained this key judgment:

Despite a decade-long international effort to disarm Iraq, new information suggests that Baghdad has continued and expanded its offensive BW program by establishing a large scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent production capability. We judge that Iraq maintains the capability to produce previously declared agents and probably is pursuing development of additional bacterial and toxin agents. Moreover, we judge that Iraq has BW delivery systems available that could be used to threaten US and Allied forces in the Persian Gulf region.

There was also consistent reporting that Saddam had in place the personnel and the infrastructure for a nuclear weapons program and that he was continuing to acquire technologies that had the potential for either nuclear or nonnuclear use.

One of the first intelligence reports that George Bush and I received in late 2000 before we were sworn in was a far-ranging assessment of Iraq’s activities concerning weapons of mass destruction. Although the report itself remains classified, the title does not. It was called Iraq: Steadily Pursuing WMD Capabilities. As there had been in the preceding decade, there would be over the next twenty-seven months a steady drumbeat of intelligence warnings about the threat posed by Saddam.

THERE WERE ALSO BY this time sixteen United Nations Security Council resolutions aimed at mitigating the danger arising from Iraq. Saddam repeatedly violated them, ignoring requirements related to weapons of mass destruction as well as those that had to do with terrorism. Resolution 687, passed in 1991, had declared that Iraq must not commit or support terrorism, or allow terrorist organizations to operate in Iraq. But in 1993 the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) attempted to assassinate former President George H. W. Bush, and throughout the 1990s, the IIS participated in terrorist attacks. Saddam provided safe haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the Iraqi bomb maker who supplied the bomb for the first attack on the World Trade Center, in 1993. He also provided sanctuary to Abu Abbas, the Palestinian terrorist who led the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro and the killing of an American passenger, and to Abu Nidal, who had killed a number of civilians in attacks on El Al ticket counters at airports in