October
1, 2002 10:20 a.m. Blix-krieg
How
not to fight Saddam Hussein.
EDITOR’S NOTE: In Vienna on Tuesday, Chief United Nations
arms inspector Hans Blix reached an agreement with representatives
of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein regarding arms inspections in Iraq.
Already, Iraq is promising unrestricted access to limited sites;
it's a bad start, with the head U.N. negotiator a man who has been
fooled by Saddam in the past — and who will most likely be
fooled by him again in the future. Here is Byron York's look at
Blix, from the current edition of NR:
ast
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.
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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."
