Chief UN weapons inspector Dr Hans Blix has said even if Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction, he doubts he would use them against British and US forces.
Dr Blix told the Belgian newspaper Le Soirthat if Iraq had such weapons, he doubts "very much that they would use them because this war has gained them a certain amount of sympathy in the world, which would turn against them if they used chemical arms".
Dr Blix, who oversaw the return of arms inspectors to Iraq before the war, also said UN arms inspectors had not had enough time to carry out their work. He said the United States had showed a certain amount of impatience by launching an attack.
"They really wanted us to come up with arguments confirming what they had said, for example, on Iraqi drones which [the US] said were made for transporting chemical weapons," he said. "We had not seen that, but we had not finished our work on that point".
The UN inspectors were pulled out last month before they could complete their search for Iraq's alleged banned chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, after the United States and Britain notified the United Nations of an impending attack on Iraq.
The inspectors had returned to Iraq last November after a four-year break. The Security Council ordered Iraq to destroy any weapons of mass destruction after its 1990 invasion of Kuwait.