History will almost certainly be kinder to Dr. Hans Blix than the Americans have been. This soft-spoken Swedish lawyer and academic, who retires this week as head of the Iraqi weapons inspectors, must have realized when he accepted the leadership of UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission that he was placing himself between a rock and a hard place.
The hard place was Saddam’s Iraq. The Western powers were sure that the Iraqis had once possessed biological and nuclear weapons programs, if for no better reason than that it was Western businessmen who had supplied Saddam’s scientists with key items of highly specialized and costly equipment. The big question was whether or not the Iraqis still had this materiel. Saddam’s regime, with its reflex resort to dishonesty, was not about to tell the truth to Blix and his UN team. The rock was the Bush White House, which wanted to get on with the invasion and war as quickly as possible. The return of the weapons inspectors was finally sold to Washington on the basis that either they would turn up evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or that they would be so obstructed in their work by the Iraqis, that they would give up and pull out. Either way, the Pentagon could get its war machine rolling before the heat of the Middle Eastern summer set in.
Despite friendly and cozy chats arranged for him with top US officials, Blix clearly set off to Baghdad with an open mind to reopen the old UN inspectors’ base. Sweet talking by the Iraqis once he arrived had little effect either. Blix’s investigations turned up very little. This was hardly surprising, since the Americans, with their effective control of the entire country, have still been totally unable to come up with any concrete evidence either.
Blix can hardly have been surprised when his team’s efforts and his own demands for more time to do his work were finally brushed aside by the impatient Americans. Yet the major shortcoming in the way that Blix conducted himself as head of UNMOVIC was the very dispassionate way in which he did his job. His criticism of both the Iraqis and the Americans was mild and almost good-mannered. As he saw his job, his major concern was to judge the evidence of weapons of mass destruction not the behavior of rival powers. This we can see now was probably a pity. His colleague, Dr Mohamed El-Baradei, from the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) was much more prepared to challenge both Washington and Iraq over their attitudes and plans. Had El-Baradei led UNMOVIC with Blix as his deputy, it might just have been possible that El-Baradei could have inspired the UN Security Council, inspired it to insist that the weapons inspectors be given all the time they required and so have avoided the death and destruction that followed.
