[…]By January 29, 2002, George W. Bush’s Axis of Evil speech laid out broader American ambitions. Iraq, it soon became clear, was priority number one.
“Maybe they had a tentative view that this needed to be cleared up,” says Blix when I ask him if he believes Washington had already made up its mind by the time the speech was made. “A residual readiness” to “go it alone” he called it.
[…] “I’m not convinced they thought there was any danger of weapons of mass destruction, or I wonder if they really believed al Qaeda was there, or that they were convinced they could have a democracy. I think it was more a question of establishing their hegemony,” says Blix. If that was the aim, it is still not “Mission Accomplished,” as George W. Bush claimed while on-board the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003. Läs intervjun