My mother, who works for the UN in New York, stood in line for an hour there to get me a signed copy of Hans Blix's book _Disarming Iraq_; bless her. I probably won't get around to reading it for awhile, but one brief glance feeds my doubts about Blix's -- or his French ghostwriter's -- competence:

"Exhibit number one in the intriguing affair was a document that purported to be a contract between the governments of Niger and Iraq for the delivery of yellowcake, or natural uranium. This yellowcake achieved the high point in its career when President Bush mentioned it in his State of the Union message on January 28, 2003: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Considering that the case had been explicitly included in the published UK dossier, the president’s statement could be argued to have been incontrovertible. But, on the other hand, the fact that at this time there existed within the president’s own administration knowledge that the key piece of evidence had been falsified, makes it a scandal that the sentence had not been purged."(p.233)

Is that so, Hans? The source of the British claims apparently was not the Niger letter, at least not centrally. According to Jack Straw, “UK officials were confident that the dossier's statement was based on reliable intelligence which we had not shared with the U.S.”

What that reliable intelligence is we're all keen to know, but Blix or his French ghost-writer certainly should have been aware of the strong British defense of the claim. Thus "the key piece of evidence" is hardly as false as Blix states.

Perhaps the scandal lies in the man entrusted with mastering the complexities of the allegations against Iraq falling for such a baseless, if widely propagated, canard.

Also, when I was opening the package the book arrived in, I got paper cuts on two of my fingers, and thus bled on the book's cover. It wiped off easily, but damn! That Blix is a dangerous man.