Hans Blix is always interesting, and always so completely sane and rational. He is one voice of reason in the roar of partisan controversy over the war in Iraq. Here are some key points from his interview with Bob Edwards.

“No weapons were found after 1994.” He also states that this fact has been pretty much ignored, and that by asking Iraq to prove that they no longer had weapons of mass destruction, we were asking them to prove a negative which is an extremely difficult if not impossible thing to do. When the UN inspectors returned to Iraq in November 2002, they inspected sites whose locations had been given them by the intelligence services, and found nothing. Although not completely convinced that it was wrong at this stage, Blix was definitely suspicious about the accuracy of the intelligence.

He talks about the buildup of arms in Kuwait and seeing it as pressure on the Iraqis to disarm, stating that if the allies had stopped about 50,000 troops, it could have been just enough pressure to make the Iraqis come forward and accept the renewal of inspections. That is what happened in reality. Saddam did indeed accept the inspectors. However, Blix also says that once the buildup had reached 300,000, the allies could not have withdrawn the troops without impossible-to-face embarrassment, so they were caught in having to go to war regardless of what the inspectors might find or the truth. They painted themselves into a corner with the size of the buildup, and from then on war was inevitable.

“The leadership did not exercise sufficient critical judgment.” This is pretty much what I’ve been talking about lately. Blix points out that intelligence is always guesswork, and I’ve already said somewhere in here how poor our past record is at such guesswork because we so seldom have our own qualified skeptics to check the accuracy of information brought to us by defectors and others with their own axes to grind. But the iffiness of intelligence is not the point. What is absolutely critical is the hard look at the guesswork that separates what is rumor and hearsay from verifiable, backed up sources that can be used as evidence to formulate policy. For some reason, this was where there was an abysmal failure on both sides of the Atlantic. It will be interesting to see what future investigations into the conduct of the war bring to light about motives for jumping to such wrong conclusions.

It is unbelievable to me that Chalabi is still being paid for his so-called intelligence, and that otherwise intelligent people would accept the words of this convicted criminal and power seeking person.

“They were 100% convinced there were weapons of mass destruction, and they had zero knowledge of where they were.” Just being convinced that something is true does not make it actually true. “if you sentence someone to war, you better have some evidence.” Conviction must be based on something more verifiable that simple belief or doubtful “intelligence”. Hans Blix illustrated this back in September when he compared Britain and the US to medieval witch hunters. “In the Middle Ages, when people were convinced there were witches, they certainly found them. This is a bit risky.”

And it is certain, in view of recent events in Spain and Iraq, that the world is not a safer place because Saddam Hussein is no longer the latter country’s brutal ruler.