Blix-krieg
How not to fight Saddam Hussein
nationalreview.com
Last February, Hans Blix, the United Nations arms-inspection chief who will, if the Security Council has its way, search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, addressed a group of inspectors-in-training at a U.N. facility in Geneva. He gave a brief history of UNMOVIC — the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission — which he now heads and which will do the searches. After the history lesson, Blix got to a key issue: How should the inspectors conduct themselves inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq? "If I were to give some adjectives of what I believe would be desirable conduct, I would say driving and dynamic — but not angry and aggressive," Blix said. Inspectors, he continued, should be "friendly, but not cozy" and "show respect for those you deal with, and demand respect for yourself." Finally, Blix advised, "A light tone or a joke may sometimes break a nervous atmosphere."
A decade earlier, on August 6, 1991, the Washington Post ran a story headlined "Baghdad Surreptitiously Extracted Plutonium; International Monitoring Apparently Failed." The story, and several subsequent reports, revealed that Saddam had put together a massive and sophisticated nuclear-weapons program virtually under the nose of one Hans Blix, who was then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the group charged with monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In the years leading up to 1991, Blix gave Saddam high marks for abiding by the treaty; the nuclear program was discovered in 1991 only after an Iraqi defector told authorities about it. Blix was stunned. "The system was not designed to pick this up," he told the Post.
Now Blix, a 74-year-old former Swedish diplomat, is preparing to take on perhaps the most important arms inspections ever. His critics point to the Iraqi nuclear fiasco and ask why a man who missed one of the most extensive illegal arms programs in recent years has been selected to conduct inspections in Iraq today. "He has a history of not being terribly aggressive," says Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "The Iraqis were given stars for good behavior, when in fact they were making bombs in the rooms next door to the ones the inspectors were going into." Two other nuclear-arms experts, Paul Leventhal and Steven Dolley of the Nuclear Control Institute, have written that while the best arms inspectors are "confrontational, refusing to accept Iraqi obfuscations and demanding evidence of destroyed weapons . . . IAEA was more accommodating, giving Iraqi nuclear officials the benefit of the doubt when they failed to provide evidence that all nuclear weapons components had been destroyed and all prohibited activities terminated."
Blix's critics also point to the way he got his current job as evidence that he is not the best choice for the weapons-inspection assignment. After heading the IAEA from 1981 until 1997, he was asked by the U.N. at the beginning of 2000 to head UNMOVIC, the new agency that replaced the older United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM). But Blix was not the first choice for the job. The United States wanted another veteran inspector, Rolf Ekeus, who was viewed as more assertive than Blix (although less so than former UNSCOM head Richard Butler). But Iraqi allies France and Russia would not accept Ekeus. "The French and the Russians didn't want Ekeus because he was too aggressive," says Milhollin. "They wanted Blix instead." Faced with those objections, the Clinton administration backed down and accepted Blix as an alternative choice.
So Blix is, in the view of a number of people of differing philosophical viewpoints, insufficiently aggressive, responsible for a momentous arms-inspection failure, and, on top of it all, Saddam Hussein's choice for the job of inspecting Saddam Hussein's weapons installations. Is there anything that can be said in his favor?
Blix's defenders say the Iraqi nuclear-weapons mess does not prove anything about the kind of job he would do in weapons-inspections today. The problem in 1991, they say, was not Blix, but rather the inspection regime that existed at the time. "I don't think you can lay it at his feet," says Ewen Buchanan of UNMOVIC. "You have to lay it at the feet of the system that was in place." Buchanan says that at the time Blix missed the Iraqi nuclear program, "the rules of the IAEA, which are drawn up by its membership, only allowed for inspection of declared facilities. So if Iraq only declared A and B, that's where the inspectors went."
It's also possible that Blix has learned from his mistakes. He was, in the words of one acquaintance, "burned very badly" by the Iraqi nuclear weapons. Maybe he'll do better now. But discussing whether Blix will do an acceptable job leaves aside the question of whether the job should be done at all. Suggesting that Blix is the wrong man for the job implies that there is a right man for the job — when the reality may be that the job is simply not worth doing at all. A senior Bush-administration official points out that the real problem here is not Blix — it's the idea that inspections can work with Saddam Hussein still in power. "It is not possible structurally for Blix or anybody else to do this job," says the official. "You can see this from the difficulties that UNSCOM had after we crushed Iraq in 1991. The fact is that when Iraq was on its knees, UNSCOM couldn't find out everything. The idea that UNMOVIC will find what it needs to find is just implausible."
There's nothing in Blix's record — even if he has improved since his see-no-evil days in the early 1990s — to inspire confidence that he will make the weapons-inspection system work this time. But there's also nothing to inspire confidence that any weapons inspections will work with Saddam. Blix, it seems, is simply the wrong man for the wrong job. |
