Blix: Lack of 'Critical Judgment' Led to Iraq War
Former Top U.N. Weapons Inspector Blames U.S., U.K. Leaders
Hans Blix, right, and Secretary of State Colin Powell appear at a press briefing at the State Department, Oct. 4, 2002.
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Morning Edition, March 16, 2004 · The leaders of the United States and Britain failed to exercise "critical judgment" in going to war against Iraq a year ago despite the lack of hard evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, says Hans Blix, the former chief United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq.
"If you sentence someone to death or you sentence someone to war, you'd better have some evidence," Blix tells NPR's Bob Edwards. "And we didn't feel there was evidence..."
Blix, whose new book is called Disarming Iraq, says he became doubtful about the existence of Iraqi WMD in January 2003. He says U.N. inspectors visited locations in Iraq that intelligence had indicated "as places where there would be weapons. And in none of these cases did we find any weapons."
Nevertheless, Blix says he did not believe before the war that a U.S.-led attack against Iraq was inevitable. The United States hoped that its military buildup, which led Iraq to allow weapons inspections, would cause Iraq to "crack" and come clean about its weapons, Blix says. "But they didn't."
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