Tell the truth: Is anyone actually surprised by this?

This came out via AP a few days ago (November 30, to be exact) but it's still worth noting:

Iraqi scientists never revived their long-dead nuclear bomb program, and in fact lied to Saddam Hussein about how much progress they were making before U.S.-led attacks shut the operation down for good in 1991, Iraqi physicists say.

Before that first Gulf War, the chief of the weapons program resorted to "blatant exaggeration" in telling Iraq's president how much bomb material was being produced, key scientist Imad Khadduri writes in a new book.

Other leading physicists, in Baghdad interviews, said the hope for an Iraqi atomic bomb was never realistic. "It was all like building sand castles," said Abdel Mehdi Talib, Baghdad University's dean of sciences. ...

At best, Khadduri writes, it would have taken Iraq several years to build a nuclear weapon if the 1991 war and subsequent U.N. inspections had not intervened. ...

No Iraqi scientists have confirmed the programs were revived in recent years. ...

"Iraq's Nuclear Mirage," available via online booksellers, dismisses the U.S. contention that the atom-bomb establishment was somehow resurrected after the IAEA demolished it, U.N. inspectors were stationed in Iraq and Iraqi specialists were scattered.

"Where is the scientific and engineering staff required for such an enormous effort?" he asks. "Where are the buildings and infrastructure?"

The continuing U.S. weapons hunt amounts to no more than "investigating mirages," he says. ...

"There was no point in trying to revive this program. There was no material, no equipment, no scientists," former bomb designer Sabah Abdul Noor said in a recent interview at Baghdad's Technology University.

The "blatant exaggeration" was in a cleverly-worded report that made it sound like the scientists had produced about four pounds of enriched uranium rather than the real figure: a fraction of an ounce. That effectively confirms a 1997 summary by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which concluded Iraqis never produced more than a few grams of the stuff.

And effectively makes either liars or fools of the fanatics in the White House.