Not that I’m a fan of Hans Blix, but I have to say this interview is very interesting, if for nothing else than its plain speaking about both sides of the Iraq war. On the one hand, he believes the “hyping” for the war was overdone and that the US and British governments used spotty intelligence to further support for its unstated belief that war with Iraq was inevitable. Check this out:

Well, it’s a little like witch hunting. If you believe there are witches, and you look hard, you will probably find them; they did so in the Middle Ages. They wanted to come to that conclusion. And people have said that, we looked a lot at his (Saddam’s) record. He’s a man who really wanted them and he made use of them in the past, and he probably still has ambitions, so the suspicion was justified ? I think so too.
However, I think that what stands accused today is the culture of spin and the culture of hype. Now, we are used to advertising, exaggerating and hyping things, and we don’t take it so seriously. We know that you guys (journalists) want to make sensations of everything, so you are likely to exaggerate a bit and pick out the juicy pieces. And we also know that governments have to simplify to explain to the public that we want to pursue this policy for the following reasons, and it cannot be too complicated. But at the same time we expect governments to be very respectable and to be dependable and I think here is where they went too far. They over-interpreted what they saw. They wanted to come to a conclusion, and they served (up) things that in some cases certainly turned out to be wrong… In Iraq’s case, exclamation marks were placed where question marks should have been used…

He makes a good point. We are such a part of the culture of spin that the fact that governments do it should not be surprising. He essentially suggests that governments should spin with caution, and be respectable and dependable while doing so. He thinks the US and Britain overstated the case for war. I disagree with him there, but I can certainly see where he’s coming from.
Read the whole thing.