BLIXIE TRICKS
Three weeks before leaving Unmovic, the commission set up to verify Saddam Hussein's complaince with 18 binding UN Security Council resolutions that he disarm, chief inspectorThe job has not been that stressful, he says. "It's just that it occupies you entirely. You don't do much else. There's been an advantage to having an old gentleman, like me, with no family around to do it."
I wonder what his wife, Eva, thought upon reading that he has no family.
On Iraqi disarmament:
What riles him most is that Iraq was not disarmed peacefully. He cups his head in his hands. "The lowest point was at the end when we realised it was not going to happen. That was very disappointing. The war cost a lot in destruction and lives."
As to whether Iraq still harbours weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he says he "remains agnostic". Only time will tell - although that is passing by "quite fast and instead of talking about [finding] WMD they're talking about the programmes.
"We know for sure that they did exist ... and we cannot exclude they may find something," he says. "I was always more prudent in my approach. I am a lawyer ... in a court things should be beyond reasonable doubt.
He knew for sure that Iraq's WMDs existed...yet wanted to reach beyond reasonable doubt, and didn't want action against Iraq unless such a standard could be met. Under that standard, the US would never have been allowed to go after Osama bin Laden. Saddam Hussein could have strung out the inspections game forever. It's an unsatisfiable standard in this case--a couple dozen inspectors cavorting around the Iraqi desert, stopping to look in on a few buildings and compounds can never reach any conclusions about Iraq's weapons that go beyond reasonable doubt. There would always be a reasonable doubt, on both sides of the question. Verification was meant to get at the best possible, knowable truth from the outside about Saddam's suspected weapons programs. Blix and his team weren't there to play lawyer and jury--their mission was to verify compliance or non-compliance and report to the UNSC. He either never understood this, or played the game to some extent himself. I'm betting on the latter:
Before he had set foot in Baghdad, Mr Blix was being accused of ineptitude and inefficacy by detractors in Washington who loathed him for being a Clinton appointee.
There were "enemies" dating from his days as a liberal student leader at Uppsala University; enemies in the form of disgruntled ex-employees closely connected to hawks in the US Pentagon...
It's not the Clinton appointee part that's illuminating, but the bit about his having been a liberal student leader. That's a euphemism for activist. Hans Blix is a lefty ideologue, and has been for decades. Also a creature of various international bureaucracies (which according to the story, have left him a wealthy man), Blix has been playing the international game for a lifetime. We would never have gotten a recommendation to punish Iraq from him. He was a human shield operating out of the UN.
Finally, there's this little tidbit, which confirms something pro-war types like me suspected:
"It's true the Iraqis misbehaved and had no credibility but that doesn't necessarily mean that they were in the wrong. It could have been bad brinkmanship. Saddam could have misjudged and read about the demonstrations in London, Paris, here and thought they won't dare to go after me."
I'll leave aside the "it doesn't necessarily mean they were wrong" part. Saddam was in the wrong. He kept power by agreeing to a set of conditions, and he never lived up to his end of the bargain. Blix is playing lawyer again, trying to split legal hairs when the truth of Saddam's behavior is pretty obvious. But I said I'm leaving that aside, to focus on the second and third parts. Prior to the war, I and many others argued that the anti-war demos around the globe--and especially in nominal US allied countries--must have warmed Saddam's murderous heart. We argued that they made war more likely, but giving Saddam reason to think he could outlast our will to get him.
Hans Blix, inadvertently it seems, agrees with us. The Communist ANSWER anti-war types, by trumping up division in the US and Europe over the war, may have made the war inevitable. You don't have to take it from me--Hans Blix suggests that that may be what happened.