Blix on Iraq

Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector from Sweden who pleaded with the US against invading Iraq in 2003, recently stated what must have been at the back of the minds of many of us, that is that neither the US and its allies pulling out of Iraq nor them staying were good options. "Iraq is a pure failure," Hans Blix, former United Nations chief weapons inspector, told a Danish newspaper last week. "If the Americans pull out, there is a risk that they will leave a country in civil war. At the same time, it doesn't seem that the United States can help to stabilize the situation by staying there." (from The International Herald Tribune, 25 Oct 06) Those opposed to the war back in 2003 and today should acknowledge that there is not, and never was, a 'good' option. The least worst option in 2003 would have been not to have invaded. This would have spared Iraq the huge death toll, estimated by some authoratitive sources to be well over 600,000, and the destruction, but would have left in power Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship. If the program of weapons inspections had been expanded to include inspections for human rights violations as the German government had proposed at the time, violations of human rights could have been considerably reduced. As it is, we now face the prospect of either unending conflict if the US stays, or else, civil war possibly leading to a break up of Iraq together with fundamentalist Islamic dictatorships if the US leaves.