Abstract

Blix Not Bombs

The author reports on former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix's views on the Iraq war and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Blix, the former head of UNMOVIC, the United Nations arms-inspection team in Iraq, is an unlikely poster-person. In his just-published book, "Disarming Iraq," he has not gone out of his way to make friends. The failure to discover WMDs in Iraq, he told "The Nation" in an interview, proves that export controls and rigorous inspection backed by military pressure had already disarmed Iraq before the war. Blix depicts the road to war in Iraq as a chronicle of willful self-delusion practiced by the major antagonists, in which Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush effectively conspired to pretend that Iraq was a military threat. Blix is not in fact certain that the Administration began with invasion in mind. By January 2003, Blix recalls, instead of finding evidence that would justify war, he had his first suspicions that Saddam might be telling the truth. One character who appears prescient about Iraq in Blix's book is Jacques Chirac, whom Blix went to see just before the war. Blix obviously relishes the admission by David Kay, the chief US WMD-hunter who recently resigned, that there were no weapons to be found. As Blix's book shows, for years after leaving the original UN inspection team Kay harshly criticized him and UN inspectors for their alleged failures.