Blix on Iraqi weapons
Read here
I'm starting to be won over to the American argument (we all criticise Chamberlain with 20/20 hindsight...)
Blix struggles to make his evidence stick, but he does raise a number of outstanding concerns:
• Iraq has not produced proof it destroyed stocks of anthrax
• Baghdad has failed to account for up to 300 rocket engines
• there was evidence it had not destroyed all its VX nerve gas
• Its weapons declaration last month contained no new material
Iraq says the problem is that it is being pressed to "prove a negative".
In public reactions to the Blix report, Iraq has accepted that it does still have significant differences with the inspection agency over two key issues:
• The UN's wish to conduct private interviews with Iraqi scientists and officials who may be able to shed light on whether Iraq has really given up its weapons of mass destruction capacity.
• The UN's plan to carry out U2 surveillance flights alongside the inspections on the ground.
The most worrying bit for me was the VX gas and the Iraqi deletion of a critical table of evidence and renumbering of the subsequent pages. Consiracy, not cockup.
Posted by nathan at January 27, 2003 08:53 PM
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