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Ex-U.N. Inspector Has Harsh Words for Bush
March 16, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
UNITED NATIONS, March 15 - Hans Blix, the former chief
United Nations weapons inspector, said Monday that the Bush
administration convinced itself of the existence of banned
weapons based on dubious findings before invading Iraq and
was not interested in hearing evidence to the contrary.
"I think they had a set mind," Mr. Blix said on the NBC
News program "Today" as he began a ten-day American book
tour in the week marking the first anniversary of the
United States-led invasion of Iraq.
"They wanted to come to the conclusion that there were
weapons," he said. "Like the former days of the witch hunt,
they are convinced that they exist, and if you see a black
cat, well, that's evidence of the witch."
In a talk to a crowd of 1,200 people on Monday night at New
York University, Mr. Blix said he did not share the Bush
administrations' view that the war had made the world a
safer place.
"Sorry to say it doesn't look that way," he said. "If the
aim was to send a signal to terrorists that we are
determined to take you on, that has not succeeded. In Iraq,
it has bred a lot of terrorism and a lot of hatred to the
Western world."
Speaking more assertively on "Today" about the Iraq war
than he does in "Disarming Iraq," his new book, Mr. Blix
charged the Bush administration with invading Iraq as
retaliation for the terrorism strikes on the United States,
even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to
the attackers.
"So in a way, you could say that Iraq was perhaps as much
punitive as it was pre-emptive," he said. "It was a
reaction to 9/11 that we have to strike some theoretical,
hypothetical links between Saddam Hussein and the
terrorists. That was wrong. There wasn't anything."
Mr. Blix said the Americans and British depended too much
on defectors and exercised too little critical judgment in
assessing their information. "The C.I.A. certainly is very
used to debriefing defectors, so they must have had a
critical mind," he said, "but they also knew what they
wanted to hear at the top."
Mr. Blix, 75, a Swedish constitutional lawyer and the
director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency
from 1981 to 1997, came out of retirement three years ago
to head up the United Nations inspection team in Iraq.
In the book, written in the same judicious and patient
style that Bush administration officials disparaged when
they criticized his approach to inspections, Mr. Blix
concedes that as late as a month before the war, he still
thought the Iraqis were concealing banned weapons.
He limits his judgment on whether the Americans and British
manipulated intelligence to saying only that it was
"probable that the governments were conscious that they
were exaggerating the risks they saw in order to get the
political support they would not otherwise have had."
Speaking of Mr. Bush and his principal ally, Prime Minister
Tony Blair of Britain, he writes, "I am not suggesting that
Blair and Bush spoke in bad faith, but I am suggesting that
it would not have taken much critical thinking on their own
part or the part of their close advisers to prevent
statements that misled the public."
In more pointed passages, he identifies Vice President Dick
Cheney as his chief tormentor in the White House, saying he
was "disdainful" of the inspection process.
In a meeting with Mr. Cheney in October 2002, Mr. Blix
writes, "He stated his position that inspections, if they
do not give results, cannot go on forever and said the U.S.
was `ready to discredit inspections in favor of
disarmament.'
"A pretty straight way, I thought, of saying that if we did
not soon find the weapons of mass destruction that the U.S.
was convinced Iraq possessed (though they did not know
where), the U.S. would be ready to say that the inspectors
were useless and embark on disarmament by other means."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/16/international/middleeast/16BLIX.html?ex=1080569748&ei=1&en=bc6d45237bc61989
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