Well, looks like the fulmination over the Oil-for-Food program is at this point academic, as France has just announced that they want the sanctions to end. Considering that Bush had already called for this, it's likely that the sanctions will therefore soon be lifted.

Good news, mostly, although it does raise a question: if the situation becomes better in Iraq due to the sanctions being lifted, can the American government justly take credit for this, considering they were instrumental in the creation and continuation of the sanction regime in the first place? I'm sure that many will blame Hussein, but he didn't create the sanctions, he just had them slapped on him when he invaded Kuwait.

Odd how these things work out, hmm?

Anyway, the article includes a quote by Blix about American shenanigans during the inspections:

In an interview with BBC radio aired Tuesday, Mr. Blix said that before the war, the United States and Britain appeared to have used "shaky" intelligence, including forged documents, in an effort to prove Iraq had banned weapons.

He called it “very, very disturbing” that U.S. intelligence failed to identify as fakes documents suggesting that Iraq tried to buy uranium from the West African nation of Niger. He told reporters at the United Nations on Tuesday that the contract about "yellow cake" uranium "was more than shaky, it was a fake."

He also told the BBC that U.S. officials tried to undermine his inspection team by telling the media that he withheld information about an Iraqi drone from the Security Council.

"They felt that stories about these things would be useful to have and they let it out," he said. "It was not the case. It was a bit unfair and hurt us."

It's pretty obvious that the Bush administration had absolutely no interest in or desire for inspections to work, as they would have threatened the policy of regime change... yet they couldn't abandon it entirely, because they hadn't yet made the shift of war justification from WMDs to "freeing Iraqis". Still, confirmation of this obstructionism isn't going to help Bush either in the eyes of non-Americans or in the eyes of history. We'll never know if inspections would have worked, because they weren't allowed to.