Saddam developed an active nuclear weapons program that had reactors under construction, until Israel blew them up. He then reconstructed a new, more secret program that was well under way until the Gulf War revealed it to U.N. authorities, who had had no clue to its existence prior to that.

Now, in 1999, Iraq was attempting to locate more raw materials for fissionable weapons, the obvious problem for them being that the current stockpile of yellowcake was under U.N. lock and key. It goes without saying that they would not have even been attempting such contacts if they had not had a planned use for the partially-refined uranium, and a plan for concealing it from the U.N. and others.

It would not take a terribly imaginative person to realize that a certain pattern suggests itself here.

Suppose someone in America had a known record of trying to construct terror bombs out of ammonium nitrate and had been arrested while actually putting one together. He gets out on parole somehow, and is much later found to have made one unsuccessful attempt to purchase three tons of fertilizer.

An FBI agent who thought like you would consider this unimportant.

I don't even know why I bother any more. The ability to construct abstract conclusions from seemingly unrelated data is a lost art.