{"id":172398,"date":"2025-06-10T07:43:09","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T07:43:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/172398\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T07:43:09","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T07:43:09","slug":"blix-not-bombs-review-former-un-weapons-inspector-revisits-the-iraq-war-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/172398\/","title":{"rendered":"Blix Not Bombs review \u2013 former UN weapons inspector revisits the Iraq war | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the age of 97, entirely lucid, still writing books and physically spry enough to be shown swimming in a Norwegian lake, former UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has given an extended interview to the Czech-born Swedish film-maker Greta Stocklassov\u00e1 about his life and times, about George W Bush Jr, Saddam Hussein<\/a> and the weapons of mass destruction that were not there. The result is insightful and a vivid time capsule for the grim and mendacious era of the \u201cwar on terror\u201d, during which Blix was tasked with discovering the truth about Saddam\u2019s supposed weapons. The film is also unexpectedly spiky, with Blix at one stage threatening to walk out, as Stocklassov\u00e1 presses him on his apparent fence-sitting, then as now, insisting on an absence of evidence for WMD but also reluctant to commit himself definitively to this being evidence of absence, and apparently unable to state where the onus of proof lies.<\/p>\n

But as he himself says \u2026 how do you prove a negative? How do you prove that there is not a mouse in this room at this very moment? After 9\/11, Blix found himself at the very centre of international pain and American dysfunction, with the US government grimly set on finding someone to lash out against, and Saddam\u2019s Iraq<\/a>, already semi-defeated in the first Gulf war of 1991, being the obvious candidate. America needed the fiction of Iraq\u2019s \u201cweapons of mass destruction\u201d as the pretext \u2013 although it was presmably their absolute conviction that there were no WMD that emboldened them to attack. (Osama Bin Laden was actually discovered in Pakistan, a nuclear power on whom regime change could not be imposed.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

So Blix \u2013 calm, professional, conscientious and diplomatic, showing up at various Iraqi sites with his UN team in the burning heat and finding nothing \u2013 was the face of this objective, non-partisan assessment. He didn\u2019t realise until it was too late, and perhaps still doesn\u2019t realise, that the protracted theatre of his polite frustration was being used by the US government to build up the necessary drumbeat of rage to facilitate the final assault: Blix the dupe, Blix the chump, Blix the internationalist liberal being laughed at by Saddam.<\/p>\n

Stocklassov\u00e1 suggests that over the 20 years since then, the calamity of the Iraq war led to the rise of Islamic State, to the tidal wave of refugees and to the new mainstream normalisation of the far right. She could be correct. Yet Blix\u2019s inspections seem part of a different world; certainly Putin didn\u2019t feel the need to go through the motions of a UN inspector who could confirm or fail to disprove his allegations of a Nazified Ukraine aggressor. Blix himself is good-natured and decent; his faith in the primacy of facts still has something heroic about it.<\/p>\n

Blix Not Bombs is on True Story from 13 June.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the age of 97, entirely lucid, still writing books and physically spry enough to be shown swimming…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":172399,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-172398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114657952432855487","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/172399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}