The US-led war in Iraq has been a "disaster which has failed in every respect except toppling Saddam", former UN chief weapons inspector Hans Blix told a conference in Dublin today.
In an address to the National Forum on Europe in the Westin Hotel, Dr Blix said although most Iraqis would have favoured a more liberal regime, its removal at the hands of the United States has been tragedy.
In the lead up to the March 2003 US invasion, Dr Blix said UN teams searched more than 700 inspection sites in Iraq and found no weapons of mass destruction.
"But as proving the negative is almost impossible," he said, "they could not exclude that weapons of mass destruction or means of producing them remained."
The former Swedish government minister said at the time his team expressed grave doubts regarding some of the evidence presented by the United States to the UN Security Council.
Dr Blix said he believed America's proclaimed right to "preemptive action" in Iraq was precipitated by its swift toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and by the fact that it was the only superpower in the world and could not be militarily opposed.
He warned that despite a reduction of the stocks of nuclear weapons from the excessive levels of the Cold War we are in a new wave of rearmament. "The nuclear haves are deepening their addiction to weapons while ever more loudly warning the have-nots against it.
Hans Blix
"There would be a better chance to dissuade others - including North Korea and Iran - from acquiring nuclear weapons if they began, themselves, to move away from these weapons, as they promised in the Non-Proliferation Treaty," he said.
Dr Blix said he believed public opinion was not engaged in the arguments surrounding weapons of mass destruction and that nations were no longer moving forward in reducing the proliferation of armaments.
"The current governments of the two European nuclear weapon states - the UK and France - seem to think that they must retain their nuclear weapons.
"The chance that France or the UK would break out from the nuclear club seems small even though it is hard to see that it would have any significant impact on their security.
"Yet, such a step would probably have a dramatic and beneficial effect to reduce the inclination of other countries to join the club and to reduce the addiction of the existing members to nuclear weapons," he said.
Dr Blix said he was still hopeful that direct talks could defuse the crisis over Iran's nuclear programme.
The theme of Dr Blix's address to the forum was "Weapons of Mass Destruction - The EU's Role".