“On October 6 [2004], Charles Duelfer, who had taken over from David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group, produced his final report on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction. Just as Kay had, Duelfer concluded Saddam Hussein had no such weapons and was making no concerted effort to develop them. …Hussein did harbor a desire to eventually re-create a weapons program after convincing the United Nations to lift sanctions, believing such arms had saved his regime during the war with Iran, deterred the United States from pressing on to Baghdad during the [first] Gulf War, and intimidated Shiite opponents. …Duelfer reported the Iraqi dictator was focused mainly on ballistic missiles and tactical chemical weapons, and his interest was driven not by conflict with the United States but by fear of Iran, his principal enemy in the region. But this was all notional; there was ‘no formal written strategy or plan for the revival of WMD after sanctions,’ Duelfer wrote in the nine-hundred-page report. [President] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney, naturally, focused on the parts reporting Hussein’s ambitions for destructive weapons, but the main message was that the war had been justified on false intelligence.”
– Peter Baker, Days of Fire, Page 348