Blix calls Britain's Iraq claim a 'fundamental mistake'

4.30pm

LONDON - The British government made a "fundamental mistake" when it claimed Iraq's Saddam Hussein could deploy weapons of mass destruction in 45 minutes, the former head of UN weapons inspectors Hans Blix said.

He told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper the claim, made in the government's September dossier on Iraq weapons, seemed "pretty far off the mark".

"It seems to me highly unlikely that there were any means of delivering biological or chemical weapons within 45 minutes," he said.

Blix, who retired last month as head of the UN weapons inspectorate, also called for UN inspectors to be allowed to return to Iraq to continue the search for banned weapons.

UN inspectors left Iraq in March as American and British forces prepared to invade. Calls for their reinstatement have been denied, with the US occupation authorities preferring instead to set up their own body, the Iraq Survey Group.

While Blix did not doubt the competence of the British and American experts, he said international inspectors from the UN would bring "greater credibility".

Meanwhile public opinion of President George W. Bush's handling of Iraq has dropped about 20 points since US forces took Baghdad in April, a Newsweek poll said.

Bush's approval rating for his handling of the military operation in Iraq fell to 53 per cent among those surveyed on July 10-11, from 65 per cent in a May 29-30 poll, and a high of 74 per cent in an April 10-11 poll taken just after Saddam Hussein was ousted from power in Iraq, Newsweek said.

The president's overall rating slipped to 55 per cent from 61 per cent in the May poll.

More than half of those polled, 53 per cent, said the Bush administration did not purposely mislead the public about evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to build support for the war, while 38 per cent said the administration had misled the public.

And in an indication of how the controversy over an incorrect assertion by Bush in his January State of the Union address that Iraq was trying to acquire uranium from Africa was playing to the public, 72 per cent said they had not heard about it.

Among registered voters, 50 per cent said issues of the economy and jobs would be more important than terrorism and homeland security in determining their vote in next year's presidential elections. Twenty-two per cent said terrorism and homeland security would be more important issues.

The registered voters surveyed were split on whether they wanted Bush to serve another term, with 47 per cent saying they would like to see Bush re-elected and 46 per cent saying they would not, while 7 per cent were undecided.

The margin of error for the telephone poll was plus or minus 3 percentage points. Of the 1,017 adults surveyed, 837 were registered voters, and the margin of error for that subgroup was plus or minus 4 percentage points.



- REUTERS

Herald Feature: Iraq