A report by CIA Director Charles Doelfer on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has settled the debate over whether Saddam threatened the world with a nuclear strike. There was no bomb.

The main American argument for going to war with Iraq – saving the world from the Iraqi threat – turned out to be false. But Doelfer sweetened the pill for Bush, who started the war: the report claims that the war’s main opponents – Russia, France and China, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – received lucrative contracts from Saddam, who thereby won them over to his side.

There is nothing new in this statement. Russia's close ties with Iraq have never been a secret. What is radically new is the list of individuals and organizations to whom Saddam issued permits to trade Iraqi oil, published in the annex to the report. According to the report, Saddam distributed these permits (vouchers) for political reasons, recruiting lobbyists for his interests. These lobbyists, in turn, named companies to the Iraqi authorities with which oil contracts should be concluded. The list of these companies was known before – their contracts were approved by the UN.

The report's authors said they had no evidence that lobbyists benefited financially from their involvement in awarding Iraqi contracts. However, they did find evidence that lobbyists were involved in the process.

According to the report, the recipients of the vouchers were a wide variety of organizations – traders, companies, parties (for example, the Indian Congress Party, the Slovak Communist Party, the Palestine Liberation Front), governments (for example, the Armenian Foreign Ministry, the Myanmar Ministry of Forestry), Iraqi friendship societies, officials and their relatives (for example, the daughter of Indonesian President Sukarno). The list includes many Russian businessmen, officials, deputies, public figures, parties and executive authorities.

The list, as the report claims, was given to the CIA on June 16, 2004, by an official of the Iraqi state company SOMO in two versions – in Arabic and English. It cannot be ruled out that it is a fabrication of the agency that had previously proved that Iraq had nuclear weapons. But this does not mean that Russia can simply pretend that the document does not exist. If it is reliable, then the facts of flagrant corruption and violation of party financing rules cannot be ignored.

From the editor: Delfer's List