Blix Believed Iraq Possessed Banned Arms

Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Tuesday that until the final days before the war, he and U.S. officials -- and perhaps even Saddam Hussein -- believed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. But rather than taking the time to find out for sure, he said, the momentum of war preparations made the Bush administration deaf to evidence that contradicted their conclusions.

“They were wrong. Their conviction was based on faith, and it was wrong,” he said. Given a little more time, Blix added, the weapons inspectors might have been able to discredit some of the misinterpreted intelligence.

“We did come to a more accurate picture than the national agencies did,” he said. “So that should be a lesson for the future.”

Blix, on a 10-day tour to promote his new book a year after the war began, returned to the United Nations on Tuesday to speak and sign hundreds of copies of “Disarming Iraq” for diplomats who spent an hour in line.

It was a quiet hero’s welcome for the meticulous, deliberate official who by happenstance helped put the world body at the center of the debate over how to disarm Iraq. Once depicted as the man who held the question of war and peace in his hands, he still maintains that the Security Council -- and ultimately, just the United States -- had the power to decide the issue.

Although he is convinced that the war was “preplanned, but not predetermined,” he wrote that he couldn’t escape the feeling that the inspectors’ work was meant to merely fill time until the U.S. military was ready. It was not simply a question of whether Iraq had an active weapons program, he wrote. It was more a question of, “We know the answers. Give us the intelligence to support those answers.” He never did get that information. Then the clock ran out on March 16 of last year.

“I could not say in the middle of March that there are no weapons of mass destruction,” he said Tuesday.

For his cautious and methodical approach to weapons inspections, the 75-year-old Swede was vilified, investigated and treated with contempt by Washington.

In a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney in October 2002, the American made clear that he thought inspections were useless and the U.S. “was ready to discredit inspections in favor of disarmament.”

Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz ordered an investigation into Blix’s background. David Kay, a former inspector with the International Atomic Energy Agency who recently resigned as head of the U.S. weapons search team in Iraq, attacked Blix for failing to uncover clandestine nuclear efforts in Iraq and North Korea while heading the U.N. agency from 1981 to 1997.

A year later, the large caches of weapons of mass destruction the Bush administration alleged were in Iraq still have not been found. In a satisfying coda for the mild-mannered Blix, it was his former employee and critic, Kay, who admitted: “We were all wrong.”

The lessons Washington should learn, he said, are to use more critical judgment and less reliance on defectors, and to “get off the spin.” The administration’s portrayal of its intelligence was meant to create “a far more ominous picture than there was,” Blix said.

“Saddam was not a threat to the region, he was not a danger to his neighbors,” Blix said. “He was a horror to his own people. The rest was an oversell.”

Blix conceded that his own gut feeling at the time, based on Hussein’s past intentions and capabilities, was that Iraq did have unconventional weapons. “I thought that there were weapons of mass destruction like everyone else.”

The fact that Hussein’s Republican Guards were equipped with gas masks and biohazard suits suggests that the Iraqi leader’s own scientists had misled him about the military’s capabilities.

“It seems that, at any rate, he might not have been all that well-informed, that they might have fooled him a bit about what they were doing, that he was more optimistic about getting new weapons and so forth,” Blix said. “I think there’s always a risk that in a totalitarian state that people will tell the dictator what they think he wants to hear.”