Blix: Global terror not so bad
07/03/2004 16:06 - (SA)
SourceLondon - The world is overestimating the dangers of global terrorism, especially when compared with a possible greater threat posed by environmental risks, former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said on Sunday.
"I think we still overestimate the danger of terror," Blix told BBC television.
"There are other things that are of equal, if not greater, magnitude, like the environmental global risks," he said without being more specific.
Blix was speaking after British Prime Minister Tony Blair had given an impassioned defence of his decision to back the US-led war against Iraq given the threat of global terrorism.
In one of his most detailed defences yet, Blair on Friday said the world faced "mortal danger" from terrorists prepared to wage "war without limits".
Blair, the closest ally of US President George W Bush in the Iraq crisis, has consistently cited Saddam Hussein's pursuit of banned weapons as the main justification for taking Britain to war last March.
But failure to find such weapons continues to dog the prime minister and has prompted accusations that he took the nation to the battlefield on false pretenses.
Blix on Sunday said Britain and the United States "should have been shaken in their views about the intelligence (regarding weapons), but they were not".
"They believed the intelligence rather than the inspectors, and unfortunately the inspectors were right," he added.
Edited by Wilmer Muller