Posted on 04/29/2004 5:16:59 AM PDT by Arrowhead1952
Hans Blix tells crowd at UT the use of pre-emptive force sets a dangerous precedent
By Nicolas Brulliard
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, April 29, 2004
Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix sharply criticized the intelligence presented by the United States in the buildup to the war in Iraq and warned against the use of pre-emptive force in a Wednesday night speech at the University of Texas.
"A pre-emptive strike must necessarily rest on intelligence that indicates the danger to be occurring, the attack to be countered," Blix said. "And it is not hard to see that the intelligence that underpinned the invasion of Iraq was unsatisfactory."
Blix said that U.N. inspections at 700 sites to verify U.S. claims provided no evidence of the existence of weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein probably destroyed those weapons in 1991.
"A couple of months of inspections would have further weakened the evidence," he said. "We wouldn't have found any weapons because there weren't any."
As the head of the United Nations' hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Blix became a central figure in the months leading to the war. Saddam's suspected possession of unconventional weapons had been the Bush administration's major rationale for the invasion, causing an intensification of the inspections. Facing slow collaboration from Iraqi authorities, Blix asked for more time to conclude the search, but President Bush decided to launch the war on March 20, 2003.
Three days before the invasion began, Bush said in a national address that U.S. intelligence left "no doubt that the Iraqi regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised." Since the war started, the Iraq Survey Group, a 1,400-member U.S. inspection team, has resumed the search for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons but has failed to uncover any arms stockpiles.
A mild-mannered diplomat, Blix has become increasingly vocal against the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq before the end of the inspections. He said that some in the White House had a low opinion of inspections and that Vice President Dick Cheney called them "useless at best." Blix also said U.S. agencies might have bugged his office during the months preceding the war.
"If they did bug me, I wish they had listened more carefully to what I said," he said, drawing laughter from the sold-out crowd at the LBJ Auditorium.
He called Saddam a "brutal and bloody ruler" but said a strategy of containment that has been used with other dictators such as Fidel Castro and Moammar Gadhafi would have been less costly in money and lives.
Blix maintained that Saddam did not pose a gathering threat to the United States and the United Kingdom and that there was no convincing link between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda, the group linked to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. He said the lack of nuclear weapons was even more significant for the potential danger that those weapons pose.
"In no area was the evidence weaker than in the nuclear area," he said.
Blix denounced what he called U.S. officials' obsession with Iraq, saying "they trusted their faith more than facts."
"It's as if the world outside the beltway was milling with rogue states," he said. "I'm as worried about the threat to global environment as I worry about weapons of mass destruction."
Blix advocated collaboration between police and financial institutions to fight terrorism and said pre-emptive strikes could set dangerous precedents, allowing India to attack Pakistan, for instance. He also criticized the Iraq war's impact on the war on terrorism.
"The action did not deter terrorism, but it is providing nourishment for terrorist acts both in Iraq and elsewhere," he said. "Is the world a better place without Saddam Hussein? Yes. Is it safer without Saddam Hussein? No."
A Swedish constitutional lawyer, Blix started his diplomatic career in 1963 with the Swedish foreign affairs ministry and became minister in 1978. From 1981 to 1997, he was director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, a U.N. body that aims to ensure that countries do not use nuclear technology for military purposes. He came out of retirement in 2000 to head the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission that was charged with disarming Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction.
Wednesday's event was sponsored primarily by the Swedish Studies Excellence Endowment.
Hans Blix couldn't have found a more interested, anti Bush crowd than at Liberal UT. They get their daily hate briefings from their professors. The only paper here is the Austin Ultra-Liberal Un-American Pravda and that just adds the hate Bush to their agenda.
========= Chemical Warhead found in Kirkuk =============
Chemical warhead found at an Iraqi air base, marked with a green band,
the symbol for chemical weaponry. Trace amounts of a nerve agent were found
at two spots along the ~meter-long warhead. These amounts are consistent with
leakage from the chemically armed weapon. A 13-foot missile was found next to it.
========= Halabja =========
Dead children, previously playing in Halabja
Victims of Saddams' WMD in March 1988. 
Iraqi missiles given to, and now located in, Syria:
Also found in Iraq:
* A clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses within the Iraqi Intelligence Service
that contained equipment subject to UN monitoring and suitable for continuing CBW research.
* A prison laboratory complex, possibly used in human testing of BW agents, that Iraqi officials
working to prepare for UN inspections were explicitly ordered not to declare to the UN.
* Reference strains of biological organisms concealed in a scientist's home,
one of which can be used to produce biological weapons.
* New research on BW-applicable agents, Brucella and Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever (CCHF),
and continuing work on ricin and aflatoxin were not declared to the UN.
* Documents and equipment, hidden in scientists' homes, that would have been useful in
resuming uranium enrichment by centrifuge and electromagnetic isotope separation (EMIS).
* A line of UAVs not fully declared at an undeclared production facility and an admission
that they had tested one of their declared UAVs out to a range of 500 km, 350 km beyond the permissible limit.
* Continuing covert capability to manufacture fuel propellant useful only for prohibited SCUD variant missiles,
a capability that was maintained at least until the end of 2001 and that cooperating Iraqi scientists
have said they were told to conceal from the UN.
* Plans and advanced design work for new long-range missiles with ranges up to at least 1000 km -
well beyond the 150 km range limit imposed by the UN. Missiles of a 1000 km range would have allowed
Iraq to threaten targets through out the Middle East, including Ankara, Cairo, and Abu Dhabi.
Clandestine attempts between late-1999 and 2002 to obtain from North Korea technology
related to 1,300 km range ballistic missiles --probably the No Dong -- 300 km range anti-ship cruise missiles,
and other prohibited military equipment.
Still missing based on the UNSCOM report to the UN Security Council in January 1999,
when the UN inspectors left Iraq in 1998, they had been unable to account for:
• up to 360 tons of bulk chemical warfare agents, including 1.5 tons of VX nerve agent;
• up to 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals, including approximately 300 tons which,
in the Iraqi chemical warfare program, were unique to the production of VX;
• growth media procured for biological agent production (enough to produce
over three times the 8,500 litres of anthrax spores Iraq admitted to UN inspectors to having manufactured);
• over 30,000 special munitions for delivery of chemical and biological agents;
• 20 al-Hussein missles with a range of 650 km, in violation
of UN Security Council Resolution 687 (Iraq had told UNSCOM that it filled these warheads with anthrax and botulinum);
• 2,850 tons of mustard gas, 210 tons of tabun, and 795 tons of sarin and cyclosarin;
• development of the Al-Samoud short-range missle (which had the capability to fly beyond the 150 km allowed by UN resolutions)
I love the sound of cornered perps crying in the morning.
I think the Iraqi people would disagree with this. 70,000 Iraqis are alive this year who would have been dead under Saddam's regime.
Blix maintained that Saddam did not pose a gathering threat to the United States and the United Kingdom
The majority of Americans disagree with you. No one thinks that Saddam would have invaded us, but he did make threats and did harbor terrorists that sought our destruction.
"It's as if the world outside the beltway was milling with rogue states," he said. "I'm as worried about the threat to global environment as I worry about weapons of mass destruction."
Well then, you'd better get on with saving the world, Blix. The sky is falling !
I have no respect whatsoever for Swedes. They sat out, worse yet AIDED the Devil, in last centurys' most Moral War.
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