Blix criticises US over weapons claims

Chief UN inspector Hans Blix criticised the US for insisting so vehemently that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction and not producing the evidence.

“It is sort of puzzling, I think, that you can have 100% certainty about the weapons of mass destruction’s existence, and zero certainty about where they are,” he said yesterday.

“We were more prudent in our assessment and I think that was shown to be pretty wise.”

A week before he ends his three-year hunt for Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons, Mr Blix spent an hour fielding questions at the Council on Foreign Relations and defending his conclusion that while many questions remain about Iraq’s weapons programmes there is still no evidence that Saddam Hussein was hiding them.

Mr Blix, the chief of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as Unmovic, questioned the Bush administration’s rush to declare that two mobile vans discovered by US search teams after the war were “the smoking gun” – used to produce biological weapons.

“Only later came the various doubts from both the US experts and from the British experts,” he said.

“I would have thought that ... after the shakiness of some of the evidence that one would be very prudent.”

He said the US was not alone in believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

“I think all the Western intelligence agencies that I met were fairly convinced that there were weapons of mass destruction,” he said, though Russia never “came out affirmatively”.

The failure of US-led teams to find illegal weapons after more than two months of searching and visits to over 230 suspected sites has become a major issue in Washington, London and other capitals.

Saddam’s possession of banned weapons was the main justification the US and Britain used for invading Iraq.

Mr Blix, who is retiring when his contract ends on June 30, said US teams may yet find banned weapons, but the more time goes by, the more the question arises of whether Saddam’s regime destroyed its weapons programmes in 1991 – as it claimed.

The question would then arise of why Iraq played cat-and-mouse with UN inspectors for so many years.

He raised three possibilities: Saddam wanted to create a mystique in the region that he had weapons; he had tremendous pride and saw himself as “the emperor of Mesapotamia”; and he was engaging in brinkmanship, listening to the anti-war demonstrators and not believing the US would “dare to do it”.

With UN inspection teams barred from returning to Iraq by the US, Mr Blix was more critical of the “shaky” intelligence he received from Washington and other capitals about sites where weapons might be hidden.

He reiterated that UN inspectors “were not impressed” by some of the evidence presented to the Security Council by US Secretary of State Colin Powell - and he was particularly dismissive of intelligence from Iraqi defectors, saying they “have not been a reliable source”.