Quote:
Originally posted by wasions
Smug? SMUG!? I think I resemble that statement. 
First: From the New Republic: "Hans Blix has been reduced to praising Iraq for partial compliance."
The quote seems to agree with me that Hans has misguided confidence in Saddam's ability to do the right thing (not a quote).
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Sure, it agrees with you - but it provides no new actual evidence or information. You, Chuck and the New Republic are all claiming that Hans Blix did a bad job because of something unrelated he said in an interview. I am claiming that he did a good job, and I will actually provide evidence instead of conjecture and assumptions. As evidence I will use, go figure,
his work. I don't think a person's job performance can be assessed while ignoring such information.
First, two matters of opinion:
1. Hans Blix expressed a desire to see the Iraqi government cooperate. But so did everybody else, so I fail to see why this is a problem. Who
didn't want to see Iraq cooperate so we could avoid military conflict?
2. I don't remember him praising them for partial cooperation, but of course his reports credited them for it. What was he to do, omit that information from his reports? Omitting this information would suggest bias far more than including it does.
I see no reason to presume that Blix's objectivity was compromised by these two facts.
Below is a link to Blix's report to the UN on January 27th of this year. It presents the facts - exactly how Iraq had responded to different situations and how forthcoming they had been. It's clear from this report that they had not cooperated fully with inspectors, and Blix makes a point to say that several times. He even goes so far as to suggest how certain Iraqi responses may be an attempt to hide information or materials.
These are not the words of somebody with 'misguided confidence' in the regime he was sent to inspect.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,76710,00.html
"In this updating I am bound, however, to register some problems."
"I am obliged to note some recent disturbing incidents and harassment."
"Where our Iraqi counterparts have some complaint they can take it up in a calmer and less unpleasant manner."
"The discovery of a number of 122 mm chemical rocket warheads in a bunker at a storage depot 170 km southwest of Baghdad was much publicized. This was a relatively new bunker and therefore the rockets must have been moved there in the past few years, at a time when Iraq should not have had such munitions."
"In the letter of 24 January to the President of the Council, Iraq's Foreign Minister stated that "all imported quantities of growth media were declared". This is not evidence. I note that the quantity of media involved would suffice to produce, for example, about 5,000 liters of concentrated anthrax."
"The recent inspection find in the private home of a scientist of a box of some 3,000 pages of documents, much of it relating to the laser enrichment of uranium support a concern that has long existed that documents might be distributed to the homes of private individuals.
This interpretation is refuted by the Iraqi side, which claims that research staff sometimes may bring home papers from their work places. On our side, we cannot help but think that the case might not be isolated and that such placements of documents is deliberate to make discovery difficult and to seek to shield documents by placing them in private homes."