Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector for Iraq urged the U.S.-led coalition to allow his team back into the country to look for weapons of mass destruction, saying that would increase the credibility of any discoveries, the Associated Press reported Thursday.
Weapons inspectors left Iraq just days before the war. Part of the justification for the war was the allegation that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Blix, who headed up searches for chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles in Iraq, also challenged President Bush's administration to present proof of its allegation that Syria has chemical weapons.
The Bush administration has also alleged that Iraqi officials and Iraq's weapons of mass destruction have been moved to Syria.
"Whoever claims this should, in the interests of credibility, very quickly present the relevant proof," Blix said during an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel. "For my part, I doubt that the Syrians would have been enthusiastic to serve as a depot of weapons of mass destruction for Baghdad."
The Bush administration has not invited U.N. inspectors to take part in disarming postwar Iraq. Instead, the United States has tried to hire away inspectors and deployed its own teams to conduct weapons searches.
"If its experts now should really discover weapons of mass destruction, their authenticity might be called into question," Blix said.
Blix also said that internationally-backed inspections would have "considerably more credibility."
Blix brings up some interesting points. The U.S.-led coalition has not as of yet produced substantial evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime possessed a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
Producing them after the war -- a war in which Iraq did not use the weapons the Bush administration was so certain to find -- may lead to international scrutiny.
That is, unless an international organization finds them.
That international organization is the United Nations.
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