Blix-krieg

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 Non-proliferation 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.

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Byron York

Byron York is a former White House correspondent for National Review.

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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 Non-proliferation 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.