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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Shape Shifter
I even recall Blix saying on television shortly after the war started that he had no doubt that WMDs would be found. I have grave misgivings of how the Administration handled the war, but Blix seems like an equivocator.

from the review

"[Blix] makes no secret of the fact that until a late stage he was himself inclined to believe that Iraq might still be concealing some stocks of chemical and biological weapons, as well as some illegal missiles."

* * * * *

Saddam Hussein agreed to let the UNMOVIC inspectors back into Iraq on September 16, 2002, when the American and British military buildup in Kuwait and elsewhere was already well under way. The conclusions of Western intelligence agencies at the time were generally hedged. The agencies said that they were "inclined to believe" weapons existed or that the evidence "strongly suggests" their presence. Such qualified claims nevertheless were the basis for the dogmatic statements pouring out of Washington and London about the monstrous and imminent threat of Saddam Hussein's WMDs—statements "as firm as [they were] unfounded," as Blix puts it. UNMOVIC's mission was to find hard evidence of Iraq's suspected WMDs.

* * * * *

[Shortly before the war,] Blix still did not know for certain that Iraq had got rid of all its illegal weapons, but he saw no evidence whatever that it still had them. No one was pleased with him. He writes that he was not bothered by differences, often insultingly expressed by US representatives, over UNMOVIC's assessment of such matters as rudimen-tary drones or old cluster bombs. But, he writes, "I still find it insulting if they believed that our assessments were prompted by a wish to avoid finding incriminating evidence." The US postwar inquiry in Iraq seems to have vindicated him handsomely on this score.

On March 17, the United States asked Blix to withdraw the inspectors in preparation for the coalition attack. Despite the intensifying heat, the troops wore protective gear against chemical and biological attack. The United States had evidently given no credence either to the reports of UNSCOM and UNMOVIC or to the statements of the Iraqis themselves about the destruction of their WMDs. Later, on handing himself over to the coalition forces, General al-Saadi told them, "There are no weapons of mass destruction and time will bear me out." Blix concludes that "the UN and the world had succeeded in disarming Iraq without knowing it."

I never had a great sense of Blix either, but surely that is because no one in this country was interested in defending or explaining his work.