If there’s anything Blix can take from his years in command of the United Nations agency that kept watch over things like chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, it’s a sense of humor and a desire to be thorough. This is a guy who became a celebrity among people who have a passion for discussing whether or not the United States should be in Iraq (and to a lesser extent, fans of the movie Team America: World Police, in which a marionette representing Blix is eaten by a shark).

I wasn’t at his speech Tuesday night at the Charlotte Museum of History in any journalistic capacity; perhaps I’d just watched Team America too many times and wanted to see what the guy was really all about. He turned out to be interesting in a C-SPAN sort of way. If you were flicking through the stations or walking by the room you might not have stopped, but if you actually sat there and listened, you got a lot out of it.

Like many people who made a case for or against the war in Iraq, Blix’s message can be polarizing, but the delivery was not. He calmly said that the Iraqis had gotten rid of most of their weapons of mass destruction after the first gulf war in 1991, but U.N. inspectors hadn’t witnessed it. That began years of fruitless searching for weapons that were, at least at the word of Iraqis, already gone. In 2003, Blix himself was in Iraq, again looking for weapons of mass destruction. He didn’t find any. Soon after, the United States began its invasion.

From a television standpoint, however, he’s refreshing. Here’s a guy who speaks in extremely long terms and has thoughts that stretch out over a minute or two. Maybe he wouldn’t be interesting to the generation that’s grown up with flash and panache—the MTV generation that’s already used to the shock and awe we saw in the first moments of the Iraq war. Not too many people from that generation were in the audience; I may have been one of the few people younger than 50 in the room.

He did have his sound bite moments. He described how those in power changed the meaning of his reports on the lack of WMD’s in Iraq; in his words, “changing question marks to exclamation points.” He said Iraqi leaders intimated that they had a stockpile, possibly to intimidate their neighbors. Blix compared it to putting up a “beware of dog” sign without actually having any dog. And, he described an Iraqi general wincing during one of his inspections. Blix told him to swallow his pride. “It isn’t painful,” Blix said. “It just feels that way.”

His greater message, though, was for cooperation and for disarmament, saying that, more than anything else, brings peace. Blix is a product of the United Nations and it’s no surprise that’s he’s an advocate for the organization. He wants everybody to work together and he’s hurt by what he perceives to be the U.N.’s diminishing role in stopping armed conflicts.

You may not agree with his message. But in an era when everybody’s got an opinion on Iraq, it never hurts to get another fresh perspective fresh from the mouth of a man who’s had such a pivotal role.

As for the woman in Canada with the cat, Blix replied that he’d be honored to have a feline named for him. He and his wife were cat lovers (even though they didn’t own any). His biggest contention was to make sure the cat also approved of the name. She e-mailed back and said that would be fine.

Her cat, she said, was a weapon of mice destruction.