By David Sanger in Washington

January 26, 2004

The blunt conclusion by David Kay, the chief US arms inspector in Iraq, that Saddam Hussein "got rid" of his unconventional weapons long before the Iraq invasion last year underscores what has become clear to intelligence experts in recent months: President George Bush moved against a country that posed a smaller risk than North Korea, Libya and Iran, or even one of America's allies, Pakistan.

While Kay's team has come up largely empty-handed so far, contributing to his decision to resign on Friday, a team of US experts visiting North Korea were shown what appeared to be a rudimentary ability to produce plutonium - though they were not able to confirm that North Korea spent 2003 churning out new weapons.

Meanwhile, investigators inspecting Libya's newly opened nuclear weapons program have uncovered a remarkably sophisticated network of nuclear suppliers, spanning the globe from Malaysia to Dubai.

On Friday, Pakistan's President, Pervez Musharraf, finally acknowledged that over a 15 year period his country's nuclear scientists had been passing on sophisticated technology for enriching uranium for what Musharraf called "personal financial gain". As some of the Administration's own intelligence experts now acknowledge, each of these programs was more advanced than Iraq's, and consequently posed a greater threat of passing on weapons and technology to terrorists.

The new information shows that the National Intelligence Estimate, produced in 2002 by the CIA and other agencies, significantly overestimated Iraq's abilities. The document provided the rationale for going to war quickly, without waiting to convince the United Nations Security Council of the threat.

Intelligence officials now say that comparable assessments understated the progress Iran and Libya were making in enriching uranium and missed many of the signals that Pakistan's scientists had sold their designs to Iran and Libya.

Yet of all these threats, Bush decided that the combination of Saddam's ambitions and his potential to obtain unconventional weapons some day in the near future posed the greater threat. His critics say he was motivated by settling unfinished business; his defenders say it would have been foolish to wait, only to discover too late that Saddam could unleash hidden weapons.

Bush and his aides are still defending their warnings about mobile biological laboratories, active nuclear programs and the like. The President continued to back his decision all last week, offering no apologies, but using wording that was far less dogmatic than last year.

America's allies and competitors are likely to interpret Kay's findings very differently: that America's word - or at least its intelligence findings - cannot be fully trusted.

The New York

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