PARIS: Hans Blix, who leaves his post as head of the United Nations inspections on June 30, says that he will spend the summer writing a book on his experiences with the United Nations Security Council and notably his work in Iraq as head of a group of inspectors. “We truly believed,” he admits, “that the Iraqis had, as they said, destroyed the ‘arms of mass destruction’ that Washington” — wrongfully, he stresses — “believes to this day still exist.”

But before tackling the book, he told an interviewer from French weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, “I’m off to Chernobyl, where I’m president of the Chernobyl Shelter Fund, it’s the organization which has decided to further cover the Chernobyl nuclear reactor with a much more secure sarcophagus.”

With regard to the UN inspections in Iraq, Mr Blix bemoans the fact that President George W. Bush either did not take the time to properly study existing documents — in which case he would have seen there were no AMDs in Iraq — or indeed knew all along there were none and wanted to attack Saddam Hussein nevertheless.

“If only George Bush had read the report that UNSCOM — the first mission of inspection to Iraq — had produced, then the Americans wouldn’t have arrived in Iraq this spring expecting to find whole stocks of chemical and biological weapons.”

“Maybe they had information we didn’t possess,” he notes, “but then I doubt that very much, for of all the suspicious sites they insisted that we visit, none of them allowed us to turn up the most minute trace of AMDs (Arms of massive destruction) or their constituent parts.”

“All we found, indeed, were some missile motors that were imported illegally, documents and some munitions documents, but none of that comes close to AMDs.”

“One thing that did affect me was an email that said: ‘you’re a man who may take yourself for a (UN) watchdog, but you’re much more of a French poodle’,” he recalled.