Hans Blix, one of the few good guys in view during the run-up to the Iraq war, headed up the UN group that examined the possibility that Iraq was hiding "weapons of mass destruction." He and his team established the fact that none existed. Bush and Cheney did their best to discredit him (and are still believed by some of their followers), but Blix's conclusions were confirmed when the war ended and no such weapons had ever been found in spite of desperate efforts by the Pentagon to find them. Blix concluded that Saddam's unwillingness to cooperate with the UN search had to do with the potential humiliation of having failed "outwit the West."
Yesterday, Blix testified at the ongoing British inquiry into the war that America's invasion did far more harm than good.
Mr. Blix concluded three hours of testimony by saying that Iraqis had suffered worse from the “anarchy” that followed the invasion in March 2003 than it had under the Hussein dictatorship. Iraq was already “prostrate” under Mr. Hussein, he said, and the impact of economic sanctions, and the invasion and its aftermath, made things worse.
Mr. Blix, 82, is customarily courtly, in the way of the Cambridge-educated international lawyer he was before he became Sweden’s foreign minister in the late 1970s. But appearing before the British inquiry as the first non-British witness to speak in a public session, his quiet, detailed account of the weapons inspections — and the decision to go to war before inspections were completed — was punctuated by acerbic observations about the American role.
He repeatedly referred to the American president as “Bush,” without using his title or an honorific, while referring to Tony Blair, the British prime minister who joined the invasion, as “Mr. Blair.” He criticized both leaders, as he has before, for resting their case for going to war on intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs that he described as poor.
“I have never questioned the good faith of Mr. Blair, or Mr. Bush,” he said at one point. “What I questioned was the good judgment, particularly of Bush, but also about Mr. Blair to some extent.”
After the invasion, American-led weapons inspection teams found no stockpiles of banned weapons or traces of continuing programs to produce them. ...NYT
