Blix Longs for Good Old Days of Saddam
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Reprinted from NewsMax.com
Tuesday, April 6, 2004
Hans Blix, that honoree of NewsMax.com's Deck of Weasels, says the people of Iraq were better off under the mass-murdering dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
"What's positive is that Saddam and his bloody regime is gone, but when figuring out the score, the negatives weigh more," the former chief U.N. weapons inspector was quoted as saying today in the Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten.
"That accounts for the many casualties during the war and the many people who still die because of the terrorism the war has nourished," the Swede complained. "The war has liberated the Iraqis from Saddam, but the costs have been too great."
So, should Saddam be reinstalled in Baghdad? Blix wasn't on record discussing that question.
Editor's note:
"Deck of Weasels" exposes Sean Penn, Sen. "KKK" Byrd, Jacques Chirac, Jesse Jackson, moreRead more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Saddam Hussein/Iraq
United NationsFormer U.N. weapons inspector Blix compares WMD search to witch-hunts
April 24, 2004
By CRAIG KAPITAN
Eagle Staff WriterIn some ways, the events leading up to the invasion of Iraq were similar to “the witch-hunts of past centuries,” former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix told a crowd at Texas A&M University on Friday night.
For those who believe in witches or weapons of mass destruction, he said, “the evidence does not have to be all that strong. You will take it.”
“ It seems to me that the U.S. and U.K. leadership were so convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction [in Iraq] that they couldn’t imagine they weren’t there,” Blix surmised.
But of course, he added, the world now knows they were wrong.
The hour-long speech, which was part of the university’s Wiley Lecture Series, came less than a month after the Swedish diplomat’s book “Disarming Iraq” was released.
In addition to his own book, Blix repeatedly referred Friday to passages from Bob Woodward’s new book, which he described as “probably selling better than I do.” That book, “Plan of Attack,” states that the Bush administration decided to go to war long before the inspections were concluded.
Bush insisted that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein harbored WMDs and should be removed as part of the broader war on terror. But since last year’s invasion, no such stockpiles have been found.
Blix was dispatched to Iraq with inspection teams in November 2002, after the U.S. began applying military pressure. The last time U.N. inspectors had been in the country was 1998 when they were kicked out by Saddam.
In the autumn of 2002, Blix said Friday, he still had a “gut feeling” that Saddam was hiding WMDs. But, he added, it wasn’t his job to operate on gut feelings.
Then his team began inspecting numerous Iraqi sites based on U.S. intelligence reports and found nothing.
“ To me, this raised great doubts about the quality of intelligence that we found,” he said. “If this is the best, what is the rest?”
While Iraq’s past treatment of weapons inspectors did raise suspicions, he said, there were plenty of reasons other than possession of WMDs that could have accounted for that.
Saddam probably didn’t have much inclination to cooperate, he said, since the dictator often was told that sanctions would be lifted only if he disappeared. Or the inspectors could have been kicked out by Saddam as a way to increase his status in the Arab world by standing up to the United States.
And the Iraqis were right in suspecting that inspectors were working for U.S. and British intelligence — effectively plotting out sites for potential future bombings, he said.
“ Maybe President Gates will be able to tell us more about that,” he joked to the crowded auditorium, referring to the former CIA director who now heads A&M.
At any rate, Saddam did agree to allow inspectors in again but that option wasn’t fully pursued, he said. In December of that year, the United States asked the U.N. Security Council to rev up the inspection process and add more inspectors.
“ We resisted that because we said we have to learn to walk before we can run,” he said, explaining that the inspection process stretched over eight years the first time around. “There was a great deal of patience at that time and now we were judged after six weeks.”
If the U.S. and British leaders would have been more patient, he said, the intelligence information likely would have been proved faulty and the events in Iraq might have played out differently.
Blix recalled discussing such possibilities with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan prior to the invasion.
At the time, sustained inspections were estimated to cost about $80 million for a year, with about 200 inspectors needed. A military invasion, on the other hand, was estimated at costing $80 billion and requiring 200,000 soldiers.
“ There’s pretty sharp differences between the two options,” he said. “I never gave up hope that something would lead to a slowing down.”
It’s important, Blix said Friday, that the world now learn from the Iraq experience.
Since the military action, terrorism hasn’t been stamped out and the U.N.’s authority has been weakened, he said. In addition, he said, a precedence has now been set for volatile pre-emptive strikes between countries like India and Pakistan.
The world also has learned that containment — the “policy of patience” that worked for decades during the Cold War — also ended up working with the usage of weapons inspectors after the first Gulf War, he said.
As the world now knows from the absence of WMDs, he said, Saddam was effectively “defanged” with the help of the U.N. teams.
But that technique was abandoned in March 2003 when the invasion of Iraq was coordinated without U.N. Security Council approval, he said.
“ We want our governments to keep some distance from the ways of the advertising world,” he concluded, adding that people wish to be shown “reality rather than virtual reality.”
“Is the world better off without Saddam? Yes, of course, but that’s only part of the story.”
