In 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.
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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.
Uh... what about this UN weapons inspector find in January 2003?
The prospect of war with Iraq rose sharply last night after United Nations weapons inspectors discovered 11 rocket warheads designed to deliver chemical weapons. They said Baghdad had failed to declare them.
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Mr Blix said there were two roads towards resolving the crisis: disarmament or the use of force.
He said that he hoped the first road was still possible but added: "We feel that Iraq must do more than they have done so far in order to make this a credible avenue."
Iraq tried to shrug off the find. "These are 122mm rockets with an empty warhead," said Gen Hussam Mohammad Amin, the head of the Iraqi national monitoring directorate, who is Iraq's main liaison with the inspectors.
"These rockets are expired . . . they were in closed wooden boxes . . . that we had forgotten about."