United Nations: The former UN chief weapons inspector, Dr Hans Blix, has expressed regret at US "impatience" to go to war with Iraq and suggested that Washington had little interest in peaceful disarmament from the outset
Also yesterday, the UN Secretary-General, Mr Kofi Annan, implicitly criticised the United States for rushing to war, saying that with perseverance Iraq could still have been disarmed peacefully.
Dr Blix said that UN Resolution 1441 in November requiring Iraqi disarmament was "extremely demanding", and perhaps the Americans "doubted that the Iraqis would go along with it, and you would have a clash from the beginning."
In an interview with the BBC in New York, he said he doubted that members of the Security Council who voted for the resolution really intended to give less than 3½ months for inspections.
"We had made rapid start," said Dr Blix, who headed the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC. "We did not have any obstacles from the Iraqi side in going anywhere. They gave us prompt access and we were in a great many places all over Iraq."
But the Americans "lost patience some time at the end of January or the beginning of February," said Dr Blix, who also criticised the information US and other intelligence services passed on to UNMOVIC and IAEA, the UN's nuclear watchdog agency. So little was found as a result of these tip-offs that it undermined the credibility of the intelligence serevices.
He said few experts believed that aluminium tubes imported by Iraq were designed for centrifuges to enrich uranium as the US frequently asserted.
"And you had the even more flagrant case of the contracts that Iraq was alleged to have tried to conclude with Niger about the importation of raw uranium" that the IAEA found was fake.
Dr Blix's remarks contrasted sharply with the assertion by the US Defence Secretary, Mr Donald Rumsfeld, yesterday that Americans could know that "their country has done everything humanely possible to avid war".
Mr Kofi Annan said: "Perhaps if we had persevered a little longer, Iraq could yet have been disarmed peacefully, or, if not, the world could have taken action to solve this problem by a collective decision, endowing it with greater legitimacy, and therefore commanding wider support, than is the case now."
In a videotaped message he promised that the UN would do whatever it could to bring assistance and support to the Iraqi people.
Mr Annan regretted that, despite the best efforts of the international community and the UN, war had come to Iraq for the third time in a quarter of a century but added: "Let us not dwell on the divisions of the past. Let us confront the realities of the present, however harsh, and look for ways to forge stronger unity in the future."
"My paramount concerns are for the safety and protection of civilians, the provision of adequate resources to the civilian population, and guaranteed access and security for humanitarian workers," the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mr Sergio Vieira de Mello, said in a statement.
Warning that Iraqi children were extremely vulnerable, with more than one million under the age of five malnourished, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) urged all parties to abide by their international humanitarian obligations.
"I urge them to do all in their power to protect children's lives, their health and their general well-being," its Executive Director, Ms Carol Bellamy, said in a statement.
The head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Mr Ruud Lubbers, urged Iraq's neighbouring countries to keep their borders open to those in need of temporary protection and assistance.
According to the agency's chief of mission in Iran, Mr Philippe Lavanchy, the situation at the Iran-Iraq border crossings was calm yesterday morning, with no reports of refugee movements into Iran following the start of strikes on Iraq.
UNHCR released $1 million to prepare four campsites, each with a capacity for 15,000 refugees, to cope with a possible initial influx of 60,000 people..
UNHCR staff who arrived in Jordan from Baghdad said they saw groups of people moving out of Iraq towards the Al Waleed/Al Tanf border crossing with Syria.