Chief UN Weapons Inspector Calls Iraq War Illegal
March 10, 2004
The war against Iraq is illegal, said Hans Blix, the Swedish diplomat who
supervised United Nations inspectors that, prior to the war, scoured the country
in a search for weapons of mass destruction.
High-ranking U.S. and British officials made repeated allegations that Iraq
possessed banned weapons of mass destruction. However, extensive searches by UN
weapons inspectors prior to the war and by U.S. inspection teams, after the war,
failed to find a single banned weapon in Iraq. "They believed the intelligence
rather than the inspectors and unfortunately the inspectors were right,' Blix
said. "There was not sufficient critical thinking. I even go so far as to say it
was like a witch-hunt."
The intelligence that was used by the U.S. and British governments to justify
the war against Iraq turned out to be wrong, Blix said. "They were so convinced
that there were witches in Iraq that every black cat became proof of it," he
said. "The tendency was to view any evidence in a more serious light than was
the reality.
"There should have been a bit more patience," Blix said. "If the inspections had
gone on for a couple more months, then I think Blair and others would have
realized that many pieces of intelligence which they relied upon were not
valid."
Britain's former Foreign Secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind accused Prime Minister
Tony Blair of "gross misuse" of the intelligence services in order to wage war
against Iraq. "It is now clear that he took Britain into war on a false
prospectus, and the Iraq war will, rightly, haunt Blair for the rest of his
premiership," Rifkind wrote in the Independent (U.K.).
Under the Independent's March 5 headline "Iraq war was illegal," Blix said, "I
don't buy the argument the war was legalized by the Iraqi violation of earlier
resolutions." According to Blix, an international lawyer and former head of the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the "ownership" of the UN resolutions
pertaining to Iraq rested with the entire 15-member Security Council, and not
with individual states. "The Security Council could have authorized it, but I
do not think it was right for individual members to do so," said Blix.
Security Council Resolution 1441, passed in November 2002, required the regime
of Saddam Hussein to comply with UN weapons inspectors but made clear that no
further action could be taken without the approval of the UN. Iraq had complied
with UN weapons inspectors prior to being invaded by U.S. and British forces.
Before the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq last March, Blix and Mohamed El
Baradei, head of the IAEA, said that in four months of searching, they had found
no evidence of any weapons of mass destruction or programs to build them. Blix
and El Baradei told the Security Council that more time was needed to make a
definitive conclusion.
The British government knew that a second resolution was necessary to justify
the planned invasion. A memo from Britain's Foreign Office to the Foreign
affairs Select Committee on March 17, 2003, "made clear that there was no
‘automaticity' in Resolution 1441 to justify war."
In Blix's recently published book, Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of
Mass Destruction, Blix describes how on March 6, 2003, the day before his final
report to the Security Council, U.S. Assistant secretary of State John Wolf
"tossed photographs of a drone and a cluster bomb on my table" and "in a rather
discourteous tone" asked why Blix did not conclude that the photographs were
evidence that Iraq was in violation of Security Council resolutions.
Blix told the press that he suspected that his UN office and home in New York
had been bugged. The photographs that Wolf had were obtained through an
intelligence agency, he said. "He should not have had them," Blix said. "I
asked him how he got them, and he would not tell me, and I said I resented that.
"It could have been some staff belonging to us that handed them to the
Americans. I don't think it is very likely, but it could have happened," Blix
said. "It could also be that they managed to break into the secure fax and got
it that way." Both the drone and the cluster bomb had been examined by UN
inspectors and determined to be inconclusive or "scrap from the past," Blix
wrote.
Jafar Dhia Jafar, the "father of Iraq's nuclear program," spoke publicly for the
first time about Iraqi weapons programs on March 8 in Beirut. Jafar said UN
inspectors had "reached total conviction" that Iraq was free of nuclear weapons.
Pressure from the U.S. government, however, prevented Blix from being more
forthright with the Security Council, Jafar said.
"Reports of the United Nations inspectors to the Security Council should have
been clear and courageous," the Iraqi scientist said. Jafar presented a paper
co-written with Noman Saad Eddin al-Noami, the former director-general of Iraq's
nuclear program, at a three-day conference on the repercussions of the invasion
of Iraq organized by the Beirut-based Center for Arab Unity Studies.
"Saddam Hussein issued orders in July 1991 for the destruction of all banned
weapons, in addition to the systems to produce them. It was carried out by the
Special Republican Guard forces." the Iraqi scientists wrote. "We can confirm
with absolute certainty that Iraq no longer possessed any weapons of mass
destruction after its unilateral destruction of all its components in the summer
of 1991, and did not resume any such activity because it no longer had the
foundations to resume such activity," they wrote.