In his book Fiasco and in this interview with Hugh Hewitt, Tom Ricks points to the 1998 Desert Fox campaign against suspected wmd sites in Iraq as evidence that containment worked. But Clinton himself had no idea how much wmd was destroyed in that campaign. He told Larry King on July 27, 2003: "When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know." Even after the invasion, in April 2003, his defense secretary, William Cohen, still believed we'd find wmd. What's more, the inspection process was not about running around the country searching for stuff. Iraq was obligated to provide "verifiable evidence" that it had, in fact, destroyed its wmd stocks and wmd-related material. As Cohen explained in 1998: "[Inspectors] have to find documents, computer disks, production points, ammunition areas in an area that size [California]. Hussein has said, 'we have no program now.' We're saying, 'prove it.' He says he has destroyed all his nerve agent. [W]e're asking 'where, when and how?'" By mid-March 2003, regardless one's postion on the inspection process, UN inspection reports still showed that Saddam had not complied with numerous disarmament resolutions. Post-invasion, Charles Duelfer noted that inspectors had discovered "clear evidence of his intent to resume WMD production as soon as sanctions were lifted." And UNMOVIC's May 30, 2003 report detailed Iraq's attempt "to conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks. "
Iraq was required to declare the import of dual-use items and supply UNMOVIC with details as to their origin. However, Iraq's recent semi-annual monitoring declarations, starting with the "backlog" of declarations since 1998 supplied to UNMOVIC in October 2002, showed a trend of withholding pertinent information....The biological imports were of a slightly more significant kind, and included the import of a dozen autoclaves, half a dozen centrifuges and a number of laminar flow cabinets. Missile imports, however, were more substantial and could have contributed significantly to any missile development programme. One example was the importation of 380 Volga engines that Iraq planned to use in the production of the Al Samoud 2 missile, a missile system UNMOVIC later determined to be prohibited since its range exceeded 150 km. In its declaration of 7 December 2002, Iraq declared that it had imported 131 such engines but failed to supply any information about their origin (suppliers, exporting countries) until inspectors observed 231 such engines at an Al Samoud production facility. A trend that was especially pronounced in the missile area (but to a lesser extent also present in the biological and chemical fields) was the use of the term "local market" to classify the import of some very sophisticated pieces of equipment....UNMOVIC came to understand that Iraq used the term "local market" when an Iraqi import company imported a commodity and then sold or transferred it to a government facility, which suggested that Iraq was trying to conceal the extent of its import activities and to preserve its importing networks."
On a separate note, the current bomb plot reminded me of two photos (scroll down to figures 1 and 2) in the Duelfer report on alleged unsuccessful attempts by Saddam's intelligence service (IIS) to weaponized perfume bottles.
It failed. From the Duelfer report (p. 43):
A former IIS officer claimed that M16 directorate had a plan to produce and weaponized nitrogen mustard in rifle grenades, and a plan to bottle Sarin and sulfur mustard in perfume sprayers and medicine sprayers which they would ship to the United States and Europe. The source claimed that they could not implement the plan because chemicals to produce the CW agents were unavailable.