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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jim Willie CB who wrote (8570)	3/19/2004 12:01:01 AM
From: ChinuSFO	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 81568

Blix: Saddam was not a threat U.N. weapons inspector doesn't believe Bush or Blair deliberately misled public By Ian Hoffman, STAFF WRITER A year after what he sees as an unnecessary and illegal war, Hans Blix is full of vindication. Even so, the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector in Iraq derives no visible pleasure from suggesting that the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has hobbled the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war that propelled an invasion force of 300,000 in 2003. Blix suggests the United States and United Kingdom are unlikely to pursue disarming strikes against foreign nations again soon. "I think they see the drawbacks of what they did," he said Wednesday in Berkeley during a 10-day tour promoting his book, "Disarming Iraq." It's his personal account of being drawn from retirement in Stockholm into a global controversy in which Blix was by turns reviled in Iraq and ridiculed as ineffectual in the United States, to emerge as a measured voice on the worth of international cooperation and inspections for arms control. Blix said that President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair turned unresolved questions about Iraq's weapons from the 1990s into grave threats against the West. "There was clearly a tendency in the U.S. and U.K., in Washington and in London, to say the unaccounted-for things existed, that they were weapons," he said. Blix, too, suspected evidence of weapons might be found. Instead, it appears that years of economic sanctions and containment kept Saddam Hussein boxed in and his weaponeers unable to furnish him with new stockpiles. "He was not a threat to the rest of the world, but he was a horror to his people," Blix told reporters Wednesday. "This is one of the great benefits I see of the war, that one of the world's despots is gone" he said later before 2,000 people at the University of California, Berkeley's Zellerbach Hall. "But that's not what the United States and Britain used as their argument before the war." In three and a half months, Blix's inspection team, known as UNMOVIC, scoured more than 200 hundred sites in Iraq, many identified by Western intelligence agencies as associated with weapons research, manufacturing and storage. They found only rocket booster engines that exceeded the range limit imposed by the United Nations in the 1990s and some papers about an exotic method of enriching uranium that Iraq seemed to have abandoned years before. Had UNMOVIC's inspectors been allowed to keep looking one or two more months, Blix said, they could have cleared hundreds of other suspected weapons sites and caused Western intelligence agencies to question their sources of information and judgment that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. "I think they would have been a little shaken, I think, that the information they had was so wrong," Blix said. But he suspects the Bush and Blair administrations were committed as early as the summer of 2002 to the invasion, regardless of the outcome of the U.N. inspections and deliberations in the U.N. Security Council. "Once they came up to the number (of) 200,000 men sitting in the desert, there was a tremendous momentum" for war that was virtually inevitable, Blix said. The majority of the Security Council favored letting the inspections proceed, he said. But the United States, Britain and Spain assumed the mantle as enforcers of past council resolutions and went to war. "When the council did not go their way, they decided to ignore it," Blix said. "Three members of the council went ahead against the wishes of the rest." That stripped the invasion of legitimacy, he said. "I cannot find a legal case for it in international law." Yet Blix does not suggest the Bush and Blair administrations intentionally misled the public or the United Nations. "I have never said that Bush or Blair acted in bad faith. I have no evidence pointing in that direction," he said. "I think it's more likely they were inclined to believe evidence that supported their view." But Blix shied from offering political judgments. At the university, he was asked, through interlocutor Christianne Amanpour of CNN, "What is your advice for beating Bush in 2004?" "Next question," he replied. Asked about allegations that the American and British governments eavesdropped on United Nations leaders, Blix said he assumed his offices were bugged as well. "I just wish they had listened to what we said," he added.