Former U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix warned Washington and London in the weeks before the 2003 invasion of Iraq that he was growing less confident in evidence Iraq had banned weapons, he said on Tuesday.
Blix was the latest senior figure to give testimony to a British inquiry on the Iraq war that has raised difficult questions about the decision by U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to invade.
The United States and Britain justified the invasion by arguing that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs and needed to be disarmed, although after the war no banned weapons were found.
Blix, who has long been an outspoken opponent of the decision to invade, told the British inquiry Washington was "high" on military power, and the U.S. military timetable was "out of sync" with the diplomatic timetable, which would have given his team more time to carry out inspections.
Blix headed a U.N. team searching for banned arms, known as weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq. He said his group's failure to find any WMDs should have caused Washington and London to question their intelligence.
"I talked to Prime Minister Blair on 20th February 2003 and then I said I still thought that there were prohibited items in Iraq but at the same time our belief in the intelligence had been weakened," Blix told the inquiry.
"I said the same thing to Condoleezza Rice .... I certainly gave some warning that things had changed," Blix said, referring to the former U.S. Secretary of State.