1 Boring Old Man

Sir John Chilcot, moderator of the Iraq Inquiry, never tires of reminding us that the point of his hearings is "lessons learned" - what can we take from this dance of human-kind’s foibles that might be useful in the future? At times, his repetition is tedious, sounding like he wants us to "make nice" when "nice" isn’t what we feel. But, on the whole, we owe him a debt of gratitude for keeping us on task. History really does repeat itself and anything that we can do to dampen that phenomenon would be welcome, particularly when the piece of history is as absurd as this one. So I’m taking him up on his challenge. What have I learned from watching these interviews?

One thing jumps off the page, something that should be obvious. History may be the study of how large groups of people interact with each other, but it usually comes down to individual personae. This sordid tale hinges on the personalities of very similar men well known to all of us - clearly paranoid men - none of whom were at these hearings in person:

Listening to the interviews, the discussions that matter were with the people who tried [in vain] to deal with them. If there was anyone interviewed who mentioned a personal encounter with any of these characters in their testimony, I missed it. They were outside of the discourse. Even the obvious mastermind of US policies operated from behind closed doors. Likewise, I don’t think any of these men ever met with each other. Britain’s Chilcot Inquiry has been about how to deal with these remote figures - none of whom are British, none of whom were available, and all of whom were paranoid and close-minded.  The men who met to negotiate our fate in these matters were not really the principals in the story:

These two world leaders seemed to be friends. They obviously listened to each other and changed what they were doing based on their meetings. They saw themselves as trying to figure out what to do about al Qaeda’s Osama Bin Laden and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, characters that they thought were not amenable to negotiation. But there were three such people in play, and they didn’t address the third one - US Vice President Dick Cheney. It was a grievous omission that left both of them, US President George W. Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair,  looking  acting like fools.

History has long been shaped by men like the three above who don’t believe in discourse with other people, but instead only see their own exercise of power as a tool for change. They approach human interaction as if it’s a chess game with wooden figures being moved about on a board jockeying for power. Their strategies and plans are held in secret, but the goal never changes - winning the game. Chess games played by Masters often end in a draw, not because they realize that winning isn’t the point. They end in a draw because of a worthy adversary, and in the end, the draw only leads to playing a new game.

Throughout the latter half of the 20th Century, the world struggled with the Asian States - the U.S.S.R. and Communist China - with policy of Containment. If the world was going to be a chessboard, then we played it for a draw. Winning was out of the question in part because we didn’t want anything from them at the time and in part because it was not winnable. All we wanted was safety. We didn’t win, we just kept playing until our adversaries evolved into more reasonable states and began to focus on the needs of their own people rather than on their hegemony - and we did it with Containment.

DR BLIX: … I think that the world has changed dramatically with the end of the Cold War. It is only recently in the last few years some American statement with Samman and others have said, well, we ought to re-discover, the Cold War is over. So the Security Council in my view was not paralysed in the 1990s. They are still not paralysed. That’s why it is reasonable to look to it and to have respect for its decisions.

DR BLIX: I think that when Condoleezza Rice, for instance, said, and I quoted in my book, when she said that the military action taken was simply upholding the authority of the Security Council, it strikes me as something totally absurd. Here you are in March 2003 and they knew that three permanent members, the French and the Chinese and the Russians, were opposed to any armed action, and they were aware that they could not get a majority for a resolution that even implied the right to military action. To say then that yes, the action upheld the authority of a council that they knew was against it I think strikes me as going against common sense.

DR BLIX: Some people thought we were bugged in New York. My only complaint about that is they could have listened more carefully to what we had to say.

DR BLIX: …People say, "What is the Security Council? The Russians and Chinese will obstruct". Not after 1999 necessarily. They are there. If they had not been willing to go along with the use of force against Iraq and they were not willing to go along with it in the case of Iraq, I think that was probably their wisdom, and therefore it is legitimate to look at it. … but in the case that some people maintain Iraq was legal I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war. I think the vast majority of international lawyers feel that way.

DR BLIX: The interesting thing: was Iraq a danger in 2003? They were not a danger. They were practically prostrate and could not - it would have taken a lot of time to reconstitute in selling oil. What they got instead was a long period of anarchy. I think one conclusion I am inclined to draw is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny.

• Sir Jeremy Greenstock, UN Ambassador for the UK
• Carne Ross, First Secretary UK Mission to New York
• Sir Christopher Myer, UK Ambassador to the US 1997-2003
• Sir David Manning, UK Ambassador to the US 2003-2007
• Sir John Holmes, UK Ambassador to France
• Dr. Hans Blix, Executive Chairman of UNMVIC.

As I listened to the testimony, it occurred to me that everything the UN did has turned out to be right: the containment of Iraq after the first Gulf War; responding to the US insistence that the inspectors be allowed to return to Iraq at the end of 2002; refusing to authorize the use of force in Iraq in March 2003.

There is a further lesson that needs to be addressed that the Chilcot Inquiry can’t help us with.

The revelation has been in the detail
The Independent
29 July 2010

Tomorrow, the Chilcot inquiry into Britain’s decision to go to war on Iraq will have sat for a whole year. It has been a suprisingly worthwhile exercise, bringing to full public view a depressing picture of the way the country was led to war against the advice and warnings of most of the experts and officials at the time. But the steady drip-drip of its evidence has served largely to confirm what many people suspected, rather than revealing anything startlingly new.

George Bush and Tony Blair were set on regime change in Iraq from very early on, before July 2002. Mr Blair misrepresented the nature of the claim that Iraq could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. There was no proof of any links between al-Qa’ida and Saddam Hussein. The British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, was "leaned on" to change his opinion on the legality of the invasion. The Cabinet was kept in the dark on many details.

There have been some interesting shifts of nuance: the former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, who had been portrayed as believing that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction, testified that, though his doubts grew, he still advised Mr Blair fairly late in the day that Saddam probably did still have them. There have been attempts at back-covering and personal apologia. There have been differences of interpretation: the former top general Sir Richard Dannatt yesterday claimed that the army was close to seizing up in 2006 when Mr Blair intervened again in Afghanistan while British troops were still in Iraq; by contrast, Mr Blair told the inquiry that the generals advised him that fighting in two theatres of war was tenable.

Sir John Chilcot’s brief is to examine the way decisions were made and actions taken and identify lessons for the future rather than apportion "blame". Some of that will be fairly detailed, as with General Dannatt’s suggestion yesterday that Britain should probably have embedded trainers with Iraqi security forces much earlier than it did. But though Chilcot will provide a lot of primary source material for historians, it is hard to now see that it casts new light on the most basic political question of whether the war was a good idea. It has just not uncovered a new smoking gun.

Some have suggested the inquiry team are at fault in that. Carne Ross, the UK’s Iraq expert at the United Nations from 1997 to 2002, has claimed that the Chilcot team have been insufficiently rigorous in grilling those called to give testimony. It has repeatedly failed to challenge witnesses on contradictions between their testimony and the evidence of documents it has uncovered. Moreover, Mr Ross claimed that the Foreign Office has withheld key documents he needed to give proper evidence to the inquiry.

For all that, Chilcot has been a useful platform in which witnesses like Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director-general of MI5, could contradict the oft-repeated New Labour nonsense that the war in Iraq did not render a generation of young British Muslim men more susceptible to radicalisation. Whether much use will be served by Sir John Chilcot’s decision earlier this month to extend the time for submissions from international lawyers – on the legal justification for the 2003 invasion – is another matter. What we want from Chilcot is new facts, not more lawyers’ opinions.

The lack of decisive new evidence now severely constrains Sir John’s options. If his final report broadly absolves Tony Blair from the charges of deliberately misleading Parliament and undertaking an "illegal" war, it will be considered a whitewash. If it does not, there will be those who will dismiss it as a kangaroo court. Unless there are further witnesses with something substantively new to say, it is probably now time for the inquiry to be drawn to a conclusion.

BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: … But there were tiny scraps suggesting contact, usually when Saddam Hussein felt under threat, and the danger was that those tiny scraps of intelligence were given an importance and weight by some which they did not bear. So to my mind Iraq, Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.
SIR LAWRENCE FREEDMAN: Were you given sight of some of the material produced by the Pentagon?
BARONESS MANNINGHAM-BULLER: I don’t think I was. Probably a good thing; it would have made me cross.

The coverage of the Chilcot Inquiry on this side of the Atlantic has been at best spotty - mostly wire-service reports when someone well-known testified, with little analysis or context. I mentioned one such story, the AP’s UN’s Blix: UK, US relied on dubious intelligence. That’s about as explanatory as saying Carrots found in Carrot Cake - obvious, but hardly touching the essence of what Dr. Blix had to say.

Time extended for NIH conflict-of-interest rules
Nature
July 26, 2010

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has decided to give the public another month to weigh in on the tightened financial reporting requirements that it proposed in May for its extramural investigators. The Department of Health and Human Services, NIH’s parent agency, announced on Friday that the public comment period for the proposed rules changes, which was to have ended on 20 July, has been extended to 19 August. Among other things, NIH is asking commentators whether it should "clarify" how the new rules would apply when an investigator changes institutions.

The request is significant because it follows this June article in the Chronicle of HIgher Education documenting how psychiatrist Charles Nemeroff evaded a two-year ban on applying for NIH grants by taking a new job as chair of psychiatry at the University of Miami. Nemeroff had been demoted by Emory University in Atlanta and banned from seeking NIH grants for “at least” two years, after he was found to have flouted financial reporting rules by failing to declare at least $1.2 million in drug company payments.

But, as the Chronicle reported, last summer Tom Insel, the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, assured Pascal Goldschmidt, the dean of medicine at Miami, that the ban would not apply to Nemeroff should he move to Miami. Nemeroff took up his new position in Florida last December. The proposed rules changes apply to NIH-funded investigators at extramural institutions and include a $5,000 minimum threshold for reporting financial interests in any single publicly traded company. Any interest in a privately held company is considered reportable. You can read our coverage of the changes that NIH is proposing here.

But it’s beginning to look as if his hubris is just calling attention to him in a very negative way. I reported that he’s the featured speaker at the Georgia Psychiatric Physicians Association Summer CME Meeting. That’s amazing to me. A guy who was publicly shamed for getting rich from CME presentations that were really drug company ads was picked for our C.M.E. speaker? What were they thinking? But it looks as if there’s going to be a low turnout. The GPPA is sending out last minute calls, offering discounts and advertising other speakers. Maybe he’s finally lost his charm.

And the NIH is going out of its way to make allowances for people to suggest ways to plug the Nemeroff loophole - get banned from applying for NIH money in one place, just change places. He’s getting a lot of Press, but it’s nothing good. NIMH Director Tom Insel and Miami Dean Pascal Goldschmidt have taken some real hits themselves for involving themselves in Charlie’s wheelings and dealings, and I expect anyone else will think long and hard before jumping on the Nemeroff band-wagon after all this noise. While it may sound like I’m just chortling over someone else’s misfortune [and maybe I am a bit], I’m also feeling relieved that Nemeroff’s brand of racketeering has run out of steam. I call it racketeering because that’s what it is - selling out to corporate interests instead of keeping medicine focused on patient care and safety.

There’s an opinion piece in the Guardian written by an Iraqi living in England [Chilcot inquiry: too late, Hans Blix: too late] that faults Hans Blix, "Back then, he minced his words, providing enough ambiguity for Tony Blair and Jack Straw to push on with their plans to drag Britain into the US-led war." Who knows about that? Everyone has their own perspective for assessing blame for what happened in Iraq. So where does the blame really lie? Who is at fault? Certainly not Dr. Hans Blix or the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry!

But one doesn’t spend time trying to partition blame unless there’s something bad wrong, and there’s no problem in this case. Almost everything is wrong, including Iraq’s existence as a state:

So after their absurd history of outside interference, we can probably put Saddam Hussein next on some kind of blame list. His pugilism has been off the scale, both within Iraq and against his neighbors. But as to his danger to the world in 2003?

^{DR BLIX: Yes. We would have been able to clear up some things, but I think Mr Blair is entirely right. We have never got the whole truth, nor do I think it was necessary to get the whole truth. The interesting thing: was Iraq a danger in 2003? They were not a danger. They were practically prostrate and could not - it would have taken a lot of time to reconstitute in selling oil.}

^{DR BLIX: No, I am not convinced that Saddam had come to that decision that they would do their utmost to cooperate. He took the strategic decision in 1991 to do away with the weapons of mass destruction, the biological, chemical and the nuclear. So there was a strategic decision but he wouldn’t admit it publicly. One reason, again, the guess is he didn’t mind looking dangerous to the Iranians. [I would add "or to the rest of the world."]}

^{New York [the UN] was in effect the front line of the UK’s work to sustain international support for controls on Iraq. Although this diplomacy was difficult and tendentious, it was not our view in New York that containment was collapsing either through the ineffectiveness of sanctions or the deterioration of international support. While there were serious sanctions breaches, it was not the UK judgement that these permitted significant rearmament, which was our major concern3. Politically, we noted a renewed French willingness to reunite the Council to pressurize Iraq to comply with the SCRs. In New York, the French ambassador spoke with enthusiasm about a new “package” to reaffirm the Council’s position that Iraq must fulfill all its disarmament obligations. It remained our view, which we explained to all at the UN, that the best method to control the WMD danger was through inspections, and Iraq’s compliance with its SCR obligations.}
^{The UK did not judge that Iraq had the means substantially to rearm, which was the key test of the effectiveness of the containment policy. It is therefore inaccurate to claim, as some earlier witnesses have done, that containment was failing and that sanctions were collapsing (and thus to claim that there was little alternative to military action to deal with the Iraqi threat). Although it required a substantial diplomatic effort, Security Council support for the resolutions had not collapsed. Indeed, had there been more diplomatic effort, above all from the US, this position could have been maintained for some time longer. But as 2002 drew on, it became clear that the US had a different agenda and had waning interest in negotiating a diplomatic way forward at the UN.}

I documented our recent history with Iraq in a recent post [Cheney’s Kampf and the war on the UN…] and implied that Iraq was just a stepping stone in the Neoconservative plan for the US to become the world’s sole superpower and essentially replace the UN - motivated partly by maintaining order, but more by expanding economic markets and gaining access to resources. I actually believe what I said to be true. Also, I’ve always said that Karl Rove came the closest to telling the truth about the Neoconservative/Administration’s motives in focusing on Iraq. It was not because Saddam Hussein was dangerous:

MARCH 20, 2008

ROVE: Well, remember, we removed, as you said, Saddam Hussein in 22 days. But then the enemy, the Al Qaeda extremists, decided to make the central battlefield in the global war on terror. This will be worth that if we win. If we win we will have dealt the enemy a huge blow in a battlefield they chose to confront us on.

And it will send a powerful message throughout the Islamic world. I think Bernard Lewis of Princeton is accurate. That the Muslim world is waiting to see who is going to win the conflict. Is it going to be the West or is it going to be Al Qaeda? And by winning, we will send a powerful message that the momentum is on our side. And it will rally the Muslim world to us. It will also create a huge influence in the Middle East. Think about the creation of the democracy in the historic center of the Middle East with the third-largest oil reserves in the world. If we have a functioning democracy in Iraq, that’s an ally in the war on terror, a counterweight to mullahs Iran and to Assad in Syria, this will create a very hopeful center of reform and energy for reform throughout the Middle East.

^{DR BLIX: Without a Security Council authorisation. As you say, the Americans, to them, it was indifferent. They had already a doctrine that said: why should we have a permission slip from the Security Council? So they didn’t need it.}
^{DR BLIX: No. There is this big discussion as to whether a second resolution would be required. I for my part thought that to me it was clear that a second resolution was required. I have seen from some of the testimony that some of the British felt that it was desirable, but it was not absolutely indispensable…  I think it was Ambassador Meyer who said there were the three groups. There were the Americans on the one side who said, "No, nothing is needed". There were others who said, "You need a second resolution", and the British were somewhere in between.}
^{DR BLIX: Well, I think there was at least implied from the US side that if the Security Council doesn’t agree with us and go along with our view, then it sentences itself to irrelevance. I think that’s a very presumptuous attitude. I think the US at the time was high on military. They felt they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable to do so.}
^{DR BLIX: I don’t think that anyone would have been satisfied unless they had come up with a report that, "Here are the weapons". Certainly the Americans would not have been satisfied with anything less than that and I was also perhaps unfairly saying this is a deficiency in the document. They had the difficulty. They could not declare something very much because they didn’t have it very much.}
^{DR BLIX: I think what was really important about this business of sites given was that when we reported that, no, we did not find any weapons of mass destruction, they should have realised I think, both in London and in Washington, that their sources were poor.}
^{DR BLIX: No. I thought that Straw was giving up around 10th March. They tried the benchmark approach, which I approved. I mean, I saw it as something hopeful, but… So when it was seen then that the US will not go along with any prolongation of inspections and there would be an invasion, I think that was the moment when it was discovered that the cluster document indicated that inspections were meaningless.}
^{DR BLIX: I have never questioned the good faith of Mr Blair or Bush or anyone else. I think to question the good faith, it will — you need to have very substantial evidence and I do not have that. On some occasions when I talked to Blair on the telephone, 20 February, I certainly felt that he was absolutely sincere in his belief. What I questioned was the good judgment, particularly with Bush, but also in Blair’s judgment.}
^{DR BLIX: The first reflection that occurs to me is that if the British Prime Minister or Bush had come to their parliaments and said, "Well, we are not sure that there are weapons of mass destruction but we fear they could reconstitute", I can’t imagine they would have got an authorisation to go to war for that purpose.}
^{DR BLIX: Those who were 100 per cent convinced there were weapons of mass destruction, if they had less than zero per cent knowledge where they were, that would have been helpful.}
^{DR BLIX: We would have been able to clear up some things, but I think Mr Blair is entirely right. We have never got the whole truth, nor do I think it was 11 necessary to get the whole truth. The interesting thing: was Iraq a danger in 2003? They were not a danger. They were practically prostrate and could not — it would have taken a lot of time to reconstitute in selling oil.}
^{DR BLIX: So inspectors can give something that the intelligence cannot, and intelligence can also give to the inspector something. It is a quality control for those who have intelligence to say, "What do the inspectors say? Does this tally?" If it doesn’t tally, I think they should be alerted and they say, "Hey, there may be something wrong". There may vice versa also be quality control on the inspectors. "Have you missed this?" In a way that was the message of Colin Powell when he came before the Security Council and said — he was very courteous about us, but said, "Listen, this is what we have found now". Implicitly he said thereby, "These guys, the inspectors, they never found this". So their intelligence was superior. It was not. We were more critical. We also had the fortune of not being taken in by defectors and people who came with their stories. So that is the important — yes, there is important lessons in this.}
^{DR BLIX: The other reflection I have is a broader one about the going to war. I am delighted that I think your intention is to draw lessons from the Iraq war rather than anything else, and I think that when can states go to war still remains a vitally important issue, and the UN Charter in 1945 took a giant leap forward in this and said, "No, it is prohibited to do except in the case of self defence and armed attack or authorisation by the Security Council". Well, here in the case of Iraq you can see how the UK in the summer 2002 or the spring 2002 said, "Yes, we might, but it has to be through the UN power". Self-defence against an armed attack was out. Regime change was out. Straw was adamantly opposed to a regime change. Authorisation by the UN, yes, that’s the path. So they insist upon 1441 and they get it, but it is a gamble. 1441 is if they had shown or if the Iraqis had continued to obstruct, as it was expected, then they could have asked the Security Council for a second resolution and said, "Look, they are obstructing and we now ask for authorisation". They never knew whether they would get that. Eventually they had to come with I think very constrained legal explanations. We see how Mr Goldsmith, Lord Goldsmith now, wriggled about and how he himself very much doubted that it was adequate, but eventually said, "Well, if you accumulate all these things, then that gives a plausible …" — he was not quite sure that it would have stood up in an international tribunal. Most of your legal advisers not think so either. Nevertheless he gave the green light to it. I think it shows the UK was wedded to the UN rules and tried to go by them, eventually failed and was a prisoner on the American train, but it is true at the same time that this rule against going to war is under strain.}
^{DR BLIX: I am of the firm view that it was an illegal war. I think the vast majority of international lawyers feel that way. This can be discussed, but I don’t think — there can be cases where it is doubtful. Maybe it was permissible to go to war. Iraq in my view was not one of those.}

UN’s Blix: UK, US relied on dubious intelligence
The Associated Press
Washington Post
By DAVID STRINGER
July 27, 2010

LONDON - The United Nations inspector who led a doomed hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq told Britain’s inquiry into the 2003 invasion Tuesday that the U.S. and U.K. relied on flawed intelligence and showed dubious judgment in the buildup to war…

At a London hearing, Blix said those who were "100 percent certain there were weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq turned out to have "less than zero percent knowledge" of where the purported hidden caches would be found…

He said he told Rice and Blair his "belief, faith in intelligence had been weakened"…

An earlier British investigation criticized U.K. spy agency officials for relying on seriously flawed or unreliable sources in drafting prewar dossiers on Iraq’s threat. Last week, Eliza Manningham-Buller, ex-director of Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5, told the inquiry that the prewar intelligence picture was "fragmentary," raising similar concerns to Blix…

Blix said he believed Blair - who testified to the inquiry in January - was genuine in his belief that Iraq has was concealing weapons, but ultimately mistaken. "I certainly felt that he was absolutely sincere in his belief," Blix said. "What I questioned was the good judgment, particularly with Bush, but also in Blair’s judgment." Blair told the five-member panel in January it was right to invade even if there was just a "possibility that he could develop weapons of mass destruction"…

The Intelligence Community’s performance in assessing Iraq’s pre-war weapons of mass destruction programs was a major intelligence failure. The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community’s assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policymakers.
—Iraq Intelligence Commission Report [US]

Its main conclusion was that key intelligence used to justify the war with Iraq has been shown to be unreliable. It claims that the Secret Intelligence Service did not check its sources well enough and sometimes relied on third hand reports. It criticises the use of the 45 minute claim in the 2002 dossier as "unsubstantiated", and says that there was an over-reliance on Iraqi dissident sources. It also comments that warnings from the Joint Intelligence Committee on the limitations of the intelligence were not made clear. Overall it said that "more weight was placed on the intelligence than it could bear", and that judgements had stretched available intelligence "to the outer limits".
—The Butler Review [UK]

"The biggest regret of all the presidency has to have been the intelligence failure in Iraq. A lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," Bush said.

But he declined to speculate on whether he would have gone to war if the intelligence had said Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.

"That’s an interesting question. That is a do-over that I can’t do," Bush said, according to excerpts from the recent ABC interview at Camp David.

Diplomat Harsh on Leaders In Testimony for Iraq Inquiry
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
July 27, 2010

LONDON — In the years Hans Blix has spent relating his struggle to deter the United States and Britain from going to war in Iraq, he has rarely spoken with the disdain for President George W. Bush and his top aides that he displayed on Tuesday before Britain’s official inquiry into the war. Mr. Blix, the Swedish diplomat who led the United Nations body that scoured Iraq for traces of Saddam Hussein’s banned weapons program, used the word “absurd” on several occasions to describe American arguments for going to war. He also described Britain, the United States’ main ally in the invasion, as “a prisoner on the American train.”

Mr. Blix concluded three hours of testimony by saying that Iraqis had suffered worse from the “anarchy” that followed the invasion in March 2003 than it had under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Iraq was already “prostrate” under Mr. Hussein, he said, and the impact of economic sanctions, and the invasion and its aftermath, made things worse. Mr. Blix, 82, is customarily courtly, in the way of the Cambridge-educated international lawyer he was before he became Sweden’s foreign minister in the late 1970s. But appearing before the British inquiry as the first non-British witness to speak in a public session, his quiet, detailed account of the weapons inspections — and the decision to go to war before inspections were completed — was punctuated by acerbic observations about the American role.

He repeatedly referred to the American president as “Bush,” without using his title or an honorific, while referring to Tony Blair, the British prime minister who joined the invasion, as “Mr. Blair.” He criticized both leaders, as he has before, for resting their case for going to war on intelligence about Iraq’s weapons programs that he described as poor. “I have never questioned the good faith of Mr. Blair, or Mr. Bush,” he said at one point. “What I questioned was the good judgment, particularly of Bush, but also about Mr. Blair to some extent”…

As for Mr. Hussein, Mr. Blix said he attributed Iraq’s failure to comply fully with United Nations inspection teams in the years before the invasion to a refusal by Mr. Hussein to undergo what he viewed as “humiliation” at the hands of the West. “I see him like Nebuchadnezzar, the emperor of Mesopotamia — an utterly ruthless, brutal man who sat with a revolver in his pocket and could use it to shoot you,” and who thought he could outwit the West “and misjudged things at the end,” Mr. Blix said…

UN weapons inspector Blix gives opinion on Iraq war
Buenos Aires News.Net
27th July, 2010

Dr Hans Blix has told the Iraq war inquiry that the arguments used by the US to justify the invasion were "absurd". Appearing before the Chilcot Inquiry in London, the man who led UN weapons inspectors into Iraq before the 2003 invasion said the US government had been tied to the idea of a pre-emptive military action. Dr Blix told the inquiry he had only believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the early days of his weapons checks, but, as time wore on, he became increasingly sceptical about intelligence given to the US by Iraqi defectors as he had visited 500 sites and found no weapons of mass destruction.

He said Washington and London should have realised that their information was poor as it was coming from people who had defected and wanted some reward for the information they were giving. He went on: "They’re inclined to give what they think their interrogators want to hear."

Dr Blix also said the US had been presumptuous to suggest the UN Security Council should agree with its intelligence, and should not have threatened that the council would be consigned to irrelevance if it did not. He said he believed the US at the time was high on military and felt that they could get away with starting a war. Dr Blix said Britain eventually became a prisoner of US war policies, which in his view were illegal.

UN’s Blix: UK, US relied on dubious intelligence
Associated Press
By DAVID STRINGER
July 27, 2010

…Blix referred to suggestions that U.S. and British intelligence tapped phones and bugged offices at the U.N. in the run-up to war. "Some people though we were bugged in New York," he said. "My only complaint about that is they could have listened more carefully to what we had to say"…

Poll: Public favors Obama’s economic policies over Bush’s by wide margin
ThinkProgress
By Alex Seitz-Wald
June 27, 2010

As congressional Republicans double down on President Bush’s failed economic policies, a new National Journal/Pew Research poll finds that Americans believe President Obama’s “policies offer a better chance at improving the economy over the policies of his predecessor.” Interestingly, more Democrats favor Obama’s policies than Republicans favor Bush’s, while independents overwhelming side with Obama. Overall, despite continued tough economic times, 46 percent of Americans say Obama’s policies will do more to improve the economy, compared to just 29 percent who say the same of Bush’s:

The poll also found that only 30 percent of Americans support retaining all the Bush tax cuts, while a similar portion believe they should all be allowed to expire. Twenty-seven percent favor repealing the tax cuts for wealthy, while maintaining the rest, as the Obama administration has proposed.

Hans Blix: Allies used ‘poor’ intelligence ahead of Iraq invasion
^{Former head of UN weapons inspectors tells Chilcot inquiry ‘alarm bells’ should have rung when his staff failed to find evidence of WMD}
guardian.co.uk
27 July 2010

Britain and the US relied on dubious intelligence sources ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the former head of the United Nations weapons inspectors said today. Giving evidence to the Iraq inquiry, Hans Blix said it should have set alarm bells ringing in London and Washington when the inspectors repeatedly failed to turn up any evidence that Saddam Hussein still had active weapons of mass destruction programmes.

Blix said he warned the then prime minister Tony Blair in a February 2003 meeting that Saddam Hussein might not have any weapons of mass destruction. He told the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, the same thing. He said: "When we reported that we did not find any weapons of mass destruction they should have realised, I think, both in London and in Washington, that their sources were poor. They should have been more critical about that." Blix said that he had privately confided to Blair in autumn 2002 – before the inspectors returned to Iraq – that he thought it "plausible" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

However in the weeks leading up to the invasion in March 2003 – after the inspectors had failed to uncover anything significant – he said that he had cautioned Blair that there might not be anything. He said that he told Blair: "Wouldn’t it be paradoxical if you were to invade Iraq with 250,000 men and find very little?" He added: "I gave a warning that things had changed and there might not be so much"…

He said that, immediately before the 2003 US-led invasion, his inspectors checked around 30 sites said by British and US intelligence to contain weapons of mass destruction, but discovered little more than some old missile engines and a sheaf of nuclear documents…he said that he did not believe that Britain and the US had been entitled to invade Iraq without a further UN security council resolution specifically authorising military action.

He accused the administration of US president George Bush of being "high on military" in the wake of the 11 September attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York in 2001. "They felt that they could get away with it and therefore it was desirable," he said. He also condemned claims by Britain and the US that Iraq had tried to acquire raw uranium for its supposed nuclear programme from Niger, based on a forged document. Blix said: "That was perhaps the first occasion I became suspicious about the evidence. I think that was the most scandalous part."

US was ‘high on military’ ahead of Iraq war, says Hans Blix
^{The Bush administration was "high on military" in the months leading up to the invasion of Iraq, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix told the Chilcott Inquiry.}
telegraph.co.uk
27 Jul 2010

Dr Blix spoke of his disquiet at the US national security strategy published in September 2002, which set out the White House’s belief in its right to launch pre-emptive attacks. He told the official inquiry into the war against Saddam Hussein’s regime that he was convinced a second UN resolution was needed to authorise military action. He said: "The US in 2002, that time you refer to, threw it [the UN process] overboard. I think they were high on military at the time. They said, ‘we can do it’."

Dr Blix added that the progress to war with Iraq was "almost unstoppable" by early 2003 and the UK was "a prisoner on that train". He told the inquiry: "Once they went up to 250,000 men and March was approaching, I think it was unstoppable or almost unstoppable - the (US) president could have stopped it, but almost unstoppable.

"After March the heat would go up in Iraq and it would be difficult to carry out warfare." He added: "The whole military timetable was, as rightly said, not in sync with the diplomatic timetable. "The diplomatic timetable would have allowed more inspections. (The) UK wanted more inspections. The military timetable did not permit that"…

Dr Blix said he was in favour of resolution 1441, passed on November 8 2002, which declared Iraq in "material breach" of its obligations to disarm and paved the way for the return of weapons inspectors. "The declaration, I felt, might give Iraq a chance for a new start," he said…

DR BLIX: We see how Mr Goldsmith, Lord Goldsmith now, wriggled about and how he himself very much doubted that it was adequate, but eventually said, "Well, if you accumulate all these things, then that gives a plausible …" - he was not quite sure that it would have stood up in an international tribunal. Most of your legal advisers did not think so either. Nevertheless he gave the green light to it.

DR BLIX: The interesting thing: was Iraq a danger in 2003? They were not a danger. They were practically prostrate and could not - it would have taken a lot of time to reconstitute by selling oil. What they got instead was a long period of anarchy. I think one conclusion I am inclined to draw is that anarchy can be worse than tyranny.

DR BLIX: …the Iraqis apparently had destroyed anthrax and buried the remnants in a place near Saddam’s palaces. This needs to be checked but I read it somewhere. They didn’t dare to admit that this had been so close to us. So I doubt very much they would have dared to go along and fulfil that condition.

SIR JOHN CHILCOT: Because they would not have dared to admit it to Saddam himself?

DR BLIX: Precisely, because of fear he would say, "What have you been doing?" That would have been hard.

DR BLIX: No, I am not convinced that Saddam had come to that decision that they would do their utmost to cooperate. He took the strategic decision in 1991 to do away with the weapons of mass destruction, the biological, chemical and the nuclear. So there was a strategic decision but he wouldn’t admit it publicly. One reason, again, the guess is he didn’t mind looking dangerous to the Iranians.

SIR RODERIC LYNE: Did you feel that it gave Iraq a realistic possibility of meeting the requirements of the resolution?
DR BLIX: Yes, except that it was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they didn’t have any.