Iraq Yellowcake

In the news today is the shipment of over a million pounds of yellowcake uranium by the United States from Iraq to Canada. It seems odd to me that we hadn't heard anything about this uranium until now even though the UN, Iraq, the US government, and every other government in the world knew about it for decades!
If the UN had Iraq's uranium completely under control, then why all the panic in 2002 about Iraq's nuclear program? And if UN control wasn't all that good, as we were led to believe by the Bush administration, and if Iraq had access to that yellowcake, then why would Iraq be out trying to buy more yellowcake from Niger, as President Bush announced in his State of the Union Address in 2003?
Well in either case, isn't it great that our neighbor Canada, despite being the world's top source of export uranium, was kind enough to help with this cleanup? What a relief to know that this uranium is no longer in Iraq, now that I know it was there in the first place. Today was the first I had heard of it.