With the Iraq nuclear issue back in the news, here's some background information that didn't make it into yesterday's New York Times piece that readers may have found of interest. Kenneth Pollack, former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration, commented in the January/February 2004 issue of The Atlantic Monthly on what U.S. intelligence believed regarding Iraq's nuclear program:

The U.S. Intelligence Community's belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration [was] that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons....

So before the controversy over Niger, uranium and aluminum tubes, US intelligence believed -- or at least told Pollack -- that Iraq had not only "reconstituted its nuclear weapons program" but was "close" to getting a nuke. Pollack also wrote:

In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).

Pollack's knowledge from his days in the Clinton administration must have been behind this quote he made to the New York Times on March 14, 2003 -- a quote made AFTER the IAEA issued its final pre-war report:

"The choice we have before us is we either go to war now or we will never go to war with Saddam until he chooses to use a nuclear weapon and he chooses the time and place. The question for me is not war or no war. It's a question of war now, when the costs may be significant, or war later when they may be unimaginable."

Of course, the rationale for removing Saddam from power was based on far, far more than Iraq's quest for nukes but the revisionist machine -- (Paul Krugman, the NTY editors, etc.) is working hard to portray it that way. More on this later...