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Blair Lacked “Critical Thinking” on Iraq, Blix Says
British Prime Minister Tony Blair lacked “critical thinking” about the intelligence that strengthened the case for war with Iraq, according to former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, the Associated Press reported Saturday (see GSN, March 1). In an interview with the London Guardian, Blix said he did not believe Blair acted in bad faith in supporting the invasion of Iraq, but argued that the British prime minister relied too much on intelligence on prewar Iraq’s alleged WMD efforts. “What I am saying is that there was a lack of critical thinking,” Blix said. He also said that had U.N. inspectors been allowed to complete their work in Iraq, the results could have led to a better analysis of prewar intelligence. “Gradually (the British and U.S. governments) ought to have realized there was nothing,” Blix said. “Gradually they would have found that the defectors’ information was not reliable,” he said (Associated Press/Yahoo!News, March 6). In an excerpt from his new book, Disarming Iraq — The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction, published Saturday in the Guardian, Blix speculated that Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush viewed the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein more in moral terms than as a means to advance nonproliferation. “It further struck me from comments he made that his awareness of the horribly brutal, evil nature of the Baghdad regime weighed heavily in his thinking,” Blix wrote of a meeting with Blair in January 2003. “Perhaps Blair and Bush, both religious men, felt strengthened in their political determination by the feeling they were fighting evil, not only proliferation,” he wrote (London Guardian, March 6). In an interview yesterday with the BBC, Blix also said the United States and the United Kingdom overstate the threat posed by terrorism. “I think we still overestimate the danger of terror. There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks,” he said (Philip Webster, London Times, March 8).
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