# Hans Blix Hans Blix (born 1928) is a Swedish diplomat and jurist who led the UN weapons-inspection effort in Iraq during the run-up to the [[Iraq War]]. As the man on the ground looking for the weapons the [[George W. Bush]] administration insisted were there, Blix became the embodiment of the multilateral verification process that Washington overrode — and, in retrospect, the official who got it right. ## Career Blix served as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997, the post later held by [[Mohamed ElBaradei]]. In 2000 the UN brought him out of retirement to chair UNMOVIC, the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission created to disarm Iraq. ## The Iraq Inspections From late November 2002 until the inspectors were withdrawn on the eve of war in March 2003, UNMOVIC and the IAEA conducted more than 900 inspections at over 500 sites. They found no chemical or biological weapons and no reconstituted nuclear program. Blix urged continued cooperation from Baghdad and asked, in effect, for more time to finish the job. His measured, skeptical reports directly undercut the urgency of the [[Powell UN Presentation]] of February 5, 2003 — Powell argued the inspections were being defeated by Iraqi deception, while Blix was reporting that the inspectors simply had not found the weapons the U.S. claimed existed. ## Vindication and Legacy No weapons of mass destruction were ever found, confirming Blix's caution and indicting the intelligence Powell presented. Blix later faulted the U.S. and Britain for acting in "bad faith" and testified to that effect before Britain's Iraq Inquiry. In the vault he stands for the disregarded check — the international verification process that the [[Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure]] steamrolled, and a rebuke to the claim that war was the only option. ## See Also - [[Iraq War]] - [[Powell UN Presentation]] - [[Mohamed ElBaradei]] - [[Iraq WMD Intelligence Failure]] - [[Colin Powell]]