Hans Blix Quotes
They have been saying for a long time that Iraq made an effort to import active uranium, and my colleague demonstrated the other day that they came to the conclusion that it was a fake document that everybody is relying upon.
Blix, Hans. Interview by Gideon Yago. MTV News, MTV, 14 Mar. 2003.
A little over a decade later, it was the conservative President who was condemning Saddam Hussein for gassing his own people and justified the Iraq War in part over that. And in 2007 Saddam having been toppled from power, he was tried for this crimes against humanity with the major charge being his gassing of the Iraqi Kurds. He was hanged for the “liberal hate speech” which had turned into conservative hate speech, but was a correct accusation regardless of which political pole was making it. There were few issues where most Americans were as unanimous as Saddam’s guilt in the gassing of the Kurds with Limbaugh and Saddam’s relatives being about the only people who saw it as propaganda.
The CIA intelligence had been shared with key world leaders to gain support for the George W, Bush administration invasion of Iraq. Blix was bothered by the fact that although the intelligence was so certain why were not any of the locations known. The answer, of course, was that there was no such development and the intelligence was faulty, but at the time, only he seemed to be bothered by this point. See also {588115}.
This was one of the many major weaknesses of our Intelligence Agencies.
This information was proven false after the invasion of Iraq. The British were persuaded it was true because the US intelligence had reached the same conclusions. And the Americans were much more confident that Saddam was actively producing WMDs because British intelligence said so. In reality, both intelligence agencies relied on the same set of false information to reach this conclusion. There was no Iraq nuclear program and no chemical or biological weapons production either. The major British-American reason for initiating the Iraq war was without foundation. It is still debated whether it was a deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration and the American neo conservatives or just bad intelligence on both sides of the Atlantic.
Powell's Performance was a great boost for U. S. foreign policy because he was so respected for his integrity. Powell persuaded much of the diplomatic community that the United States was justified in invading Iraq. Tragically, what Powell said was not true. He had been given false and doctored information by the CIA, the Vice President, and others at the White House. Powell lost the great respect that much of the diplomatic world had for him, and the affect on him was personally devastating. He took no more public positions. The change in American public opinion about Powell that resulted was dramatic even though Powell himself was deceived.
The claims of the President that Hussein even had weapons of mass destruction were untrue. Eagleburger’s criteria for war would have been even more stringent as is clear in this quotation. Foreign affairs experienced members of the President’s own party tried to dissuade him from this disastrous plan of invading Iraq but were unable to.
Hans Martin Blix is a Swedish diplomat and politician for the Liberal People's Party. He was Swedish Minister for Foreign Affairs (1978–1979) and later became the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. As such, Blix was the first Western representative to inspect the consequences of the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union on site, and led the agency response to them. Blix was also the head of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission from March 2000 to June 2003, when he was succeeded by Dimitris Perrikos. In 2002, the commission began searching Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, ultimately finding none. On 17 March 2003, U.S. President George W. Bush delivered an address from the White House announcing that within 48 hours, the United States would invade Iraq unless Saddam Hussein would leave Iraq. Bush then ordered all of the weapons inspectors, including Blix's team, to leave Iraq so that America and its allies could invade Iraq on March 20. In February 2010, Blix became head of the United Arab Emirates' advisory board for its nuclear power program. He is the former president of the World Federation of United Nations Associations.
