Bush and Blair have lost credibility - ex-weapons inspector
Former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix says that President George Bush and Tony Blair have lost credibility and the world is not safer now that Saddam Hussein is out of power.
And he adds that it was clear 10 months ago that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
In an address at New York University, Blix said the United States should have know months ago that there were no weapons to be found.
“By May I knew there was nothing because the Americans had interrogated so many Iraqis by then and even offered money and still they found nothing,” he said.
Blix, who is on a speaking tour for his new book Disarming Iraq, suggested that the United States was motivated to go to war because of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
“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,” he said.
He disagreed that the war had made the world a safer place.
“Sorry to say it doesn’t look that way. If the message was to terrorists that we are willing to take you on, then that has not succeeded. In Iraq, it has bred a lot of terrorism and a lot of hatred to the Western world.”
“Disarmament by war and democracy by occupation are difficult prospects.”
Blix was especially critical of the United States and Britain for claiming the war was meant to uphold UN resolutions when the rest of the Security Council refused to back the conflict. He said Bush and Blair “oversold” what they knew.
“The moral of this story has been clearly a loss of credibility for the leaders of this war and that they didn’t think the council mattered. That was a mistake,” Blix said.
Blix, who was often vilified by supporters and opponents of an invasion in the run-up to the Iraq war, left his post at the United Nations last June at a time when many thought US troops could find biological, chemical or even nuclear weapons in Iraq.
But dozens of search teams over the last year have found nothing and many of the initial resources devoted to the hunt have since been shifted to other projects.
The 75-year-old Swede identified Vice President Dick Cheney as his number one opponent inside the US administration.
In a meeting with Mr Cheney in October 2002, Blix said he was told the United States “was ready to discredit inspections in favour of disarmament,” unless Blix’s teams were able to find weapons the US administration insisted were in Iraq.
Blix said he had been convinced for years that the Iraqis were hiding weapons of mass destruction but began having doubts when intelligence provided by the United States and other countries was not producing results.
He blamed an over-reliance on defectors and a refusal on the part of the US administration to consider the possibility that the intelligence was wrong.
