Blix blasts Iraq war, calls for nuclear disarmament

Former chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix spoke about the "inconvenient truths" of disarmament to a standing-room-only crowd in Dodds Auditorium yesterday.

"Without the right diagnosis, how can you apply the right therapy? The war in Iraq did not have the right diagnosis: There were no WMD," Blix said somberly. "We are in a Cold Peace coming off of the Cold War."

The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997, Blix recently admitted that he was duped for many years by the Iraqi regime when his team failed to find weapons of mass destruction, a mistake which came to light only after the Gulf War in 1991. Today, Blix concedes the impossibility of proving that something does not exist.

"The country to be inspected is a big place; there are a lot of basements, a lot of corners," he said, speaking of his more recent inspections of Iraq from 2002 to 2003.

Despite the lack of evidence for the presence of WMD presented by the UN inspections team, the U.S. government went forward with its attack on Iraq.

"[The evidence of WMD] was weak from the beginning, and it was known within the administration," he said. "They did not critically examine the evidence they had ... the question marks handed to them became exclamation marks."

To Blix, "the war [in Iraq] was a tragedy. The WMD were an unfounded justification ... The sole success I can see of the war is that Saddam is gone."

With exasperation, Blix recounted a laundry list of ever-changing justifications for the war in Iraq — all of them, he said, as baseless as the weapons of mass destruction he never found.

As for the rationale that the war was fought for democracy, Blix countered that "we have seen more anarchy than democracy."

He said the newest justification is that "this is a signal to the terrorists, but now we see that the Iraq occupation has created more of a breeding ground for terrorism than a signal against it."

Blix said the best road to a safer global community is an international commitment to nuclear disarmament. But he added, "treaties are not very reliable. They are respected by the good guys and neglected by the bad guys."

Words are not enough, he said, and the leading nuclear powers, including the United States, must disarm and lead by example. Blix said the United States and the United Kingdom are taking the opposite path by developing instead of eradicating their nuclear weapons programs.

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"Nuclear war cannot be won and must not be fought," Blix said.

In one of his final speeches as U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan told a Princeton audience last November that the international community was like a pilot "asleep at the controls of a fast-moving aircraft" on the issues of nonproliferation and disarmament.

Blix echoed this imagery in his speech yesterday that "[Al] Gore has shown us one inconvenient truth ... Annan showed us another: that we are sleepwalking into an arms race."

He cited how the Bush administration downplayed the threat of a global arms race to quiet skepticism that could have prevented U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Adam Herling '07, a Wilson School major who attended the speech, said he was shocked to hear the extent of the UN's certainty that there were no WMD. "[Blix'] view that the processes [of weapons inspection] are and were working is surprising and important," he said, noting that the government misrepresented the information. "In our media, we usually hear how it [the weapons inspections process] is not working.