"The country was cornered," he said. "We were boycotted. We were embargoed. The truth is, we disintegrated."

Those are the words of Sabah Abdul Noor, from a long, important article in today's Washington Post. He's describing his work and the work of fellow scientists on Iraq's nuclear program in the period after the first Gulf War. The truth is now obvious: The war and subsequent international pressure boxed them in, thwarting their attempts to move forward on weapons development -- and what he says about the nuke program clearly seems to apply to every part of Iraq's program to acquire and develop unconventional weapons. Nothing was working -- chemical, biological, or nuclear -- for unconventional-weapons scientists in Iraq after Gulf War I. Here's the Post's summary:

...investigators have found no support for the two main fears expressed in London and Washington before the war: that Iraq had a hidden arsenal of old weapons and built advanced programs for new ones. In public statements and unauthorized interviews, investigators said they have discovered no work on former germ-warfare agents such as anthrax bacteria, and no work on a new designer pathogen -- combining pox virus and snake venom -- that led U.S. scientists on a highly classified hunt for several months. The investigators assess that Iraq did not, as charged in London and Washington, resume production of its most lethal nerve agent, VX, or learn to make it last longer in storage. And they have found the former nuclear weapons program, described as a "grave and gathering danger" by President Bush and a "mortal threat" by Vice President Cheney, in much the same shattered state left by U.N. inspectors in the 1990s.

A review of available evidence, including some not known to coalition investigators and some they have not made public, portrays a nonconventional arms establishment that was far less capable than U.S. analysts judged before the war. Leading figures in Iraqi science and industry, supported by observations on the ground, described factories and institutes that were thoroughly beaten down by 12 years of conflict, arms embargo and strangling economic sanctions. The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructures were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down lines of command. The broad picture emerging from the investigation to date suggests that, whatever its desire, Iraq did not possess the wherewithal to build a forbidden armory on anything like the scale it had before the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Try to clear time to read this one.