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Can the U.S. trust a UN bureaucrat to inspect Saddam?
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Special to World Tribune.com
GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT.COM
Tuesday, October 1, 2002
As the United States heads for a showdown with Iraq, a Swedish diplomat is negotiating with the regime of Saddam Hussein over the return of weapons inspectors.
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ÒWe do not intend to provoke, to harass, or to humiliate Iraq with our inspections."
Hans Blix:
PhD., Cambridge, 1959
Former foreign minister, Sweden
Former head, UN International Atomic Energy Agency
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Hans Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, was called out of retirement to take over the new agency. Blix is generally considered a suave, cool, diplomat, the consummate UN bureaucrat, having headed the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna from 1981 to 1997.
It is remembered by some old-timers that it was IAEA, which gave the Iraqis a clean bill of health in 1981 ø just before the Israelis bombed the Osirak nuclear center that was under construction, and by most accounts, probably set back their weapons program by a decade.
There is also concern that Blix, as a European, will be more amenable to the strong pressure coming from the Europeans for a negotiated settlement with Saddam ø even at the risk of dropping some of the safeguards, which Butler and earlier inspection teams demanded.
The IAEA acts Òas the world's central intergovernmental forum for scientific and technical cooperation in the nuclear field, and as the international inspectorate for the application of nuclear safeguards and verification measures covering civilian nuclear programs.Ó
When Sadaam Hussein forced UNSCOM's withdrawal from Iraq in December 1998 and amid increasing pressure to ease the sanctions that had been in place since the end of the Persian Gulf War, the UN Security Council heatedly debated how to address Baghdad's continuing noncompliance.
The outspoken Australian former UNSCOM executive chairmen Richard Butler is worried about what has happened since inspectors left Iraq in December 1998.
But Blix says that while he has no preconceived ideas about what is happening in the Iraqi armaments program, he does not believe that in the nuclear field they could have rebuilt an enrichment process, which is the way the Iraqis were going about making a weapon.
In the missiles field, Blix says that there is a possibility the Iraqis have rebuilt since they were bombed by the U.S. and the British in December 1998. And on biological and chemical weapons, Blix claiming expertise only in the nuclear field admits that we do not know.
Two years ago Blix told a disarmament magazine that he did not think that Iraq was trying to rearm and that there was no substantiation for media reports that said it was.
Blix has said that UNMOVIC would be ready to begin inspections in Iraq as soon as they were allowed. Its task, like USCOM before it, is verifying that Iraq is disarmed of all weapons of mass destruction and missiles with a range exceeding 150 kilometers.
UNMOVIC has a core staff of 46 in New York and a roster of 180 experts, and some staff had completed advanced training courses, including one on biological weapons. After a public row over exchanges between CIA and the UN, UNMOVIC now receives information from a commercial satellite imagery contract and compares the images of Iraqi sites with a database of 15,000 items to look for infrastructure changes at sites inspectors previously visited. But as everyone involved with Iraqi inspections has said, satellites cannot see through roofs to the inside of buildings.
The new agency started with only a small complement from the old USCOM. Blix was FranceÕs compromise candidate after the Security Council took the unprecedented action of rejecting the secretary generalÕs nominee.
In an interview early in 2000, Blix did say: ÒWe do not intend to provoke, to harass, or to humiliate Iraq with our inspections. The word ÔintendÕ is important, because I am not leaving it to Iraq to say that we cannot do something because of how they feel about it. It is UNMOVIC that will judge whether an action is provocative or humiliating in the judgment of a reasonable person. And I think I am a reasonable person.Õ
However, in the same interview, Blix has said he has a difference with the old USCOM in that it maintained that its determination of whether Iraq was abiding by the disarmament agreement was final. Blix takes the attitude that he would take the evidence to the Security Council for it to decide: that canÕt be good news to Washington with the non-permanent members often being virtual virtual allies of Sadaam. The Iraqis have been expert even at dividing the permanent members of the Security Council over the issue.
Blix also appears to waffle on the issue of getting information about who has supplied Iraq with the nuclear know-how it would use to make weapons of mass destruction. ÒDoes the question of who helped them still remain a key disarmament issue?Ó he says in the earlier published interview. ÒYou could say that the Ôfull, final and complete disclosureÕ demand of Resolution 707 is not satisfied if such an issue is still unresolved. But is it a key disarmament issue? I don't know. So, I think that's going to be an illustration of where judgment will have to be exercised.Ó One might ask: whose judgment? Blix or the Security CouncilÕs?
Some movement in Baghdad has been detected and more can be expected. With Blix at his side, UN Sec. Gen. Kofi Anan on March 7, told the media that after talks with the new Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri, he detected "some flexibility" in Baghdad's persistent refusal to comply with Security Council resolutions.
Blix told interviewers after his appointment that he felt progress was possible with Iraq because Baghdad might be willing to swap full-blown inspection for a lifting of the economic sanctions and the end of the bombing.
ÒIt is true that the IAEA, UNMOVIC, and Iraq cannot prove the absence of the smallest pieces of things,Ó he said. "But the name of the game is to re-establish confidence. To do that, Iraq needs to do precisely what Resolution 1284 mandates: namely, cooperate.Ó
Confidence in Sadaam Hussein is just what the Bush Administration says it does not have. The question is whether it can have confidence in Hans Blix as a principle negotiator if and when inspectors are again allowed into the country to look for the weapons of mass destruction.
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