Blix and team uncovered no evidence of WMDs or active programs thereof whatsoever, nor have following US inspections. If Blix and IAEA had been allowed to complete the job, they might have found evidence, if it existed, but not finding any evidence would have completely invalidated Bush and Blair’s case for war. Since the inspectors and the UN were booted out of Iraq by impending US and UK-sponsored war (NOT by Saddam), the premature departure of independent weapons inspectors is best not brought up as evidence of UN failure, because it’s nonsense. They were doing a fine job up until they were kicked out – the one failing of the Blix inspections was that they failed to find what Bush wanted them to find.
The UN was “acting” just fine until Bush decided to derail the process. And most countries would have preferred to see the inspections process completed before resorting to war, for various reasons that include economic, religious, and cultural considerations in addition to bleeding-heart pacifism. We’ve heard a lot of hot air about “so-called allies” who were “in bed with Saddam”. Please let’s get away from this simplistic nonsense and try to focus on real issues, such as evidence instead of the cheap demonization coming from Bush and Blair and their partisan minions on this subject.
As for the UN debates, those were routinely derailed and mischaracterized by US and UK officials, who repeatedly alleged that France and Germany would “never” accept a war, and that therefore the UN must be sidelined. The actual comment from France was along the lines of “France will not support a resolution leading to automatic war”, which is what the US was pushing for. That has to be the most demonized comment I am aware of in recent history. France and Germany also provided several warnings of “clash of civilizations”, counter-productive actions, terrorist-stimulus, and so forth, which are all pretty straight-forward instances of logical reasoning, not far-fetched crystal-ball gazing.
He said he had none. Inspectors failed to find any evidence whatsoever of such weapons, and said as much, corroborating Saddam’s denial. The US said that the reams of documents Iraq provided did not demonstrate the non-existence of all suspected weapons programmes; one of the problems is that the US analysts (or, more likely, certain politicians) failed to take into account despotic bureacracy, the personal accountability of scientists and project leaders who report failure to Saddam, the chaotic and disorganized nature of Saddam’s regime, and so forth. So, still without any evidence, the US and UK continued to trumpet “imminent threat”, “WMDs”, “mushroom cloud”, etc, in pure and simple alarmist influence tactics even when the intelligence services of both countries provided strong warnings about the flimsiness of WMD evidence (warnings that were routinely ignored by politicians as they sensationalized each and every unproved claim they could lay their hands on).
This war was decided long before Blix even got sent to Iraq. It had been on the agenda for at least a year prior to invasion and (oh look) fit in perfectly with the bullshit drafted by PNAC, so let’s not kid ourselves with the whole “blame Saddam for the war because he did not show evidece of absence” propagandist cagal.