You should read more directly from Hans Blix, especially if you're gonna rely on his findings.
Blix in 2006:
I also worry about the hyping and the spinning that takes place in international affairs. I read somewhere the saying from Lincoln that you can fool some people all of the time and all of the people sometime but not all of the people all the time. That is not happening nowadays. They consider this as far too pessimistic a view. (Laughter.)
The public relations gurus who sit in their cabinets—near the cabinets at any rate—in the big cities, in the big capitals, they too know that. It leads to a very smart management of media. Of course the world is big and they do not manage everybody, but there is a fair amount of this going on.
You have the wild debate here about the intelligence [about Iraq] and who failed and who succeeded and who was closer to the truth. But there is very little I see in the U.S. press about the fact that [IAEA Director-General] Mohamed ElBaradei before the war in Iraq said the yellow cake-story, the contract between Niger and Iraq, was a forgery. I sat on the Security Council when he said it was a forgery. Well, he used diplomatic language, “it was not authentic.” (Laughter.)
And there is relatively little talk about the fact that we carried out 700 inspections at 500 different sites before the war and we said to the Security Council and to the Americans and the British that we found no weapons of mass destruction. Now, out of these places that we visited—and this is highly significant—there were about three dozen sites, which were given to us by intelligence in different countries, and in none of them did we find any weapons of mass destruction. We found some conventional ammunition in one, a stash of documents in other place, et cetera, but no weapons of mass destruction.
One of the points of the “Butler Committee” that examined the shortcomings of the [pre-war] British intelligence was that they felt that after the revelations and after the reports of UNMOVIC and of the IAEA, the British ought to have reevaluated that intelligence.
My belief is that if we had been allowed to continue with inspections for a couple of months more, we would then have been able to go to all of the sites which were given by intelligence. And since there were not any weapons of mass destruction, we would have reported there were not any. This ought to have given them some thought about the reliability of their sources. Whether it would have prevented the invasion I’m less affirmative about. But it would have been certainly more difficult. There was a momentum in this. A the end of the February and the beginning of March when you have a couple hundred thousand people sitting in the desert that is a momentum itself. You have to take a decision. Either you find a big event and you call it off or you have to move forward. I think that at the very end we were irrelevant. The momentum had caught on and it was too late.
armscontrol.org
Blix in 2005:
eurotrib.com
Blix in 2004:
theage.com.au
armscontrol.org
commondreams.org
msnbc.msn.com
npr.org
Blix in 2003:
guardian.co.uk
armscontrol.org |
