DR. BLIX: I think they could, but I think that they—and I—and the commission is also in favor of urging and getting Iran to stop enrichment of uranium. But I think they have to see what is it that might move them towards further enrichment, enriched uranium and to a weapon. What is that—what are the incentives and what should be the disincentives for it?

I think it’s welcome that the Western states have now suggested that they might give Iran light-water reactors, because I think that counters the argument that the Western world would like to deprive Iran of the—of the more modern technology. I’m not so sure that the U.S. joining the table will make that much of a difference because, as I understand it, the Iranians will read it that, “Yes, we would like to sit down with you and discuss stopping enrichment, and we will tell you what goodies you’ll get for that, but that is presupposing that you stop enriching.”

MR. RUSSERT: Well, the U.S. is saying, “Stop enrichment and we’ll sit down.”

DR. BLIX: That’s right.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, isn’t the ball in the Iranians’ court?

DR. BLIX: No. I think that when you say that, “We will sit down with you, provided you stop enrichment,” well, then, you are really staking out what you want the negotiations to end in. I think there ought to be a possibility to reach this result, but I think you have to look at the question of security. And this is very likely what we should do.

MR. RUSSERT: So the U.S. should lift that condition?

DR. BLIX: I think they will in due course. I think that they will be brought to discuss also the security of Iran.

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MR. RUSSERT: You think...

DR. BLIX: But the—there—there is also weakness in the attitude of the states that have nuclear weapons in saying that, “You must stay away from this. We will not.” It’s a little like a person smoking a cigar and telling his children, “You should not smoke.”

MR. RUSSERT: You also write in your report that the U.S. should, in effect, make a guarantee against a military attack.

DR. BLIX: Well, guarantee is a word that I think the U.S. will not say, but I think it will be enough if they said we will respect the U.N. charter,’ in Article 2, paragraph four, which says that you can’t use armed force against a territorial integrity in other states.

MR. RUSSERT: “Mohamed ElBaradei the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, has privately told Western leaders that they have to accept a limited Iranian enrichment program under IAEA monitoring, as it was a matter of national pride and to insist on scrapping it may only bolster Iranian hardliners.” Do you agree with that?

DR. BLIX: I think he’s absolutely right in saying that it’s a matter of national pride. But I think there is a lot of prestige, also, in the Western positions.

MR. RUSSERT: So, but how do you say to the Iranians, “It’s OK to enrich,” and that’s the—one of the key international spokespeople, and when, when the Europeans and the Americans are trying to says, “Stop enriching or we won’t talk”?

DR. BLIX: I fully understand the demand that they should stop enrichment, because it—the Middle East is such a dangerous place that if a country like Iran is beginning to move in that direction, it will increase tensions. And I—and, and it will—if they do enrich on large scale, it will bring them perhaps two years closer to a nuclear bomb. But Iran today is not an imminent threat. And they talk a lot about the chapter seven of the U.N. charter, that presupposes that Security Council will establish that there’s a threat to international peace and security. No one talks about chapter six, which says—talks about controversies, which if they continue, may constitute a threat to international peace and security.

MR. RUSSERT: After the war in Iraq began, a year—about a year later, you had said this: “There was a lack of critical thinking, that there was probably not a wish to do critical thinking, and that there was a will to do spin. When you saw that, you felt, hey, this is a bit of an oversell.”

DR. BLIX: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: Explain.

DR. BLIX: Well, take Prime Minister Blair, who said that the Iraqis had a capacity to use weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes, with the implication being that it could hit the United Kingdom in 45 minutes. Well, what was that but spin? And when we see the evidence, they certainly failed to, to examine the, the alleged agreement between the Iraq and, and Niger about the yellow cake, the uranium oxide. I mean, this—one could have doubts about even when hearing about it in the autumn. It was only Mohamed ElBaradei who revealed before the war in the Security Council that this was what he called not authentic, the contract was not authentic. What he should have said was perhaps it was a forgery. People would have understood it better.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think that the Bush administration spun the intelligence?

DR. BLIX: I think all the parties on the alliance were—spun the intelligence. They want to, they—I could say that they, they mislead themselves, first, and thereafter they mislead the world. I have never said that they were in bad faith. I think to say that you have to have very strong evidence. I have never said that.

MR. RUSSERT: Could the war have been avoided?

DR. BLIX: I think so. We had carried out about 700 inspections, and we had been to about three dozens of sites, which the intelligence had given us, and in none of these cases did we find any weapons of mass destruction. If we had been allowed a couple of months more, we would have been able to go to all the sites given by intelligence, and found no weapons, since there weren’t any. Now, the intelligence would have understood then that their sources were poor.

MR. RUSSERT: But the French and the Germans would have not gone forward with any kind of military action?

DR. BLIX: No, I think the U.S. would have refrained, also, from the war if they had seen that their sources were bad, and if this information had trickled upward. So the result would have been, very likely, that Saddam would have stayed. I think the great gain of the war was that Saddam the butcher was taken out. But for the rest, it was not, it was not a successful war.

MR. RUSSERT: Not having found weapons of mass destruction, why do you think Saddam engaged in this cat-and-mouse game and didn’t come clean?

DR. BLIX: That’s right. You know, that’s a good question, and one possibility is that he was like someone hanging a sign on the door, “Beware of the dog,” without having a dog. When he wanted to tell Iran, and he wanted to tell others that “I’m still dangerous.” He was also very isolated person. I don’t think that he really had, at the end of the 19--2003, that he had the power to come back. He would have become more like a Qadaffi or like a Castro, wing clipped.

MR. RUSSERT: About two months before the war, this was a piece in The Los Angeles Times: “The chief U.N. weapons inspector [Hans Blix] disclosed troubling new details about Iraq’s weapons programs and expressed frustration with what he described as Baghdad’s refusal to resolve long-standing questions about efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, as well as long-range missiles. ... His criticism was perhaps his sharpest since the current confrontation with Iraq began ... and its tone surprised veteran weapons inspectors.” You later said in your gut, you felt that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

DR. BLIX: In the autumn of 2002, I was asked, “What do you think? Do they have them or not?” And I said, “My job is not to tell you my gut reactions. My job is to inspect,” and that’s what we did. In my gut, as you say, I also was under the impression, like most people, that these guys had played cat-and-mouse during the whole of the ‘90s, so I was suspicious of that. But as the inspections proceeded, gradually, and we didn’t find anything, well, I became more doubtful. And we looked at, at the evidence, that was our job. And the evidence did not point to anything. We were displeased with the Iraqis, that they did not make a greater effort to clarify, and—but maybe they couldn’t do much more. So that’s—we expressed that displeasure with, with them publicly.

And I will say that by the time of February, February 2003, they were frantic in trying to clear up the, the question. We could say that there are lots of things unaccounted for, but unaccounted for means are they there or are they not there? And the U.S. administration was saying, “They are unaccounted for. Where are they?” That was a very different type of conclusion.

CONTINUED

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