Blix Not Bombs review – former UN weapons inspector revisits the Iraq war

Greta Stocklassová’s documentary films Hans Blix, aged 97, and asks about his role in the war, WMD, and why his world of diplomacy has now disappeared

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 Stocklassová about his life and times, about George W Bush Jr, Saddam Hussein 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 “war on terror”, during which Blix was tasked with discovering the truth about Saddam’s supposed weapons. The film is also unexpectedly spiky, with Blix at one stage threatening to walk out, as Stocklassová 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.

But as he himself says … 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’s Iraq, already semi-defeated in the first Gulf war of 1991, being the obvious candidate. America needed the fiction of Iraq’s “weapons of mass destruction” as the pretext – 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.)