Arms and the inspector

Hans Blix was the kind of United Nations diplomat Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald L. Rumsfeld loved to hate. As the head of the U.N. weapons inspectors, he was the cautious Swede who refused to either confirm or deny that there were weapons of mass destruction in the frantic months leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. When Blix said the weapons hadn’t turned up, Rumsfeld quipped, “The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.” Blix stood his ground insisting that the “absence of evidence” should not be spun into proof of concealment. Cheney took Blix’s refusal to support the American line as proof of what he had been saying all along, that it was a mistake for the United States to go for inspections in the first place.

Now that U.S. weapons inspector David Kay and the American inspection teams have also failed to find any evidence of such weapons, Blix, in retirement in Sweden, has published a memoir that says, in effect, “I told you so.” Were it not so even-tempered, judicious and ironic in tone, “Disarming Iraq” could be subtitled “Blix’s Revenge.”

A 304-page book about weapons inspections, written by a Swedish septuagenarian, doesn’t sound like an inviting prospect, but it turns out to be sharp and interesting throughout. True, you will not find cameo sketches of national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, and you won’t learn any new gossip about the high and mighty, but the story Blix has to tell is amazing. You will come away ever more indignant that the world’s most powerful intelligence services allowed their political bosses to turn a distant threat into an imminent danger. The book may also leave you angry at the way in which the administration trashed Blix and his inspectors. “Blix Tricks Irk U.S.” was only the most inventive of the headlines of the stories the administration leaked to undermine his efforts. In the end, not only had the much-maligned inspectors destroyed a lot of Saddam’s inventory between 1991 and 1996, but when they returned in 2002, they quickly established a more accurate list of what remained than the CIA had.

The real question about U.N. weapons inspections is not whether they work, but when to back them up with a credible threat of force if inspectors encounter resistance or obstruction. On this matter, blanket denunciations of the “axis of evil” only confuse matters. One size will not fit all. What worked in Iraq will not work in North Korea. Trying the same tactics with Iran would court disaster.

Although Blix’s book will be ransacked by both sides in the still-bitter argument about the war, he makes a case that is too complex to pigeonhole into either side of the debate. He refuses to accuse President Bush or Prime Minister Tony Blair of deliberately lying or even of bad faith since, like them, he shared the widely held view in 2002 that Saddam had something to hide. He grants, as many opponents of the war do not, that without deployment of U.S. forces, “Iraq would probably not have accepted a resumption of inspections.” He also disagrees that the “U.S. wanted the inspections to fail,” arguing, on the contrary, that the administration “urged us to expand them very fast and to conduct them ‘aggressively.’ ” Nor does he think the administration planned the war after Sept. 11 and used the weapons issue as a pretext.

Where Blix faults the administration is on timing. If the inspectors had been given more time -- until July 2003 -- and had continued to meet resistance, Blix is reasonably sure the Security Council would have authorized armed action, and the United States would have gone to war with the world on its side. Bush thus failed to rein in the military rush to war until the diplomatic offensive and the inspections process had created a global consensus behind American action.

Blair failed likewise: Knowing that more time was needed to build diplomatic support, he buckled and let the American military timetable drive his country into war. Blix does not speculate on the vexed question of whether the U.S. would have called off the invasion if the inspectors had pronounced Iraq weapons-free in July 2003, his preferred date for winding up the inspections. There remains the suspicion that Bush and Blair would not even have taken yes for an answer, so fixed were they on regime change.

Blix’s proudest claim in this memoir is that he reestablished the independence of his inspectors from the U.S. and British intelligence services. The one serious criticism to make of his account is that he doesn’t seem aware of the price to be paid for keeping at arm’s length from the spooks. His independence left him baffled at what the Americans and British knew about Hussein’s programs.

Previous inspection regimes had worked closely with government intelligence services. When Richard Butler had been in charge of U.N. inspections during the 1990s, U.S. spies “piggy-backed” as inspectors and funneled raw inspection data back to their bosses in Washington. This had led the Iraqis to believe, with reason, that the inspectors were American spies.

Blix fired Charles Duelfer, an American left over from the days of the U.N. Special Commission, as soon as he took over, to demonstrate his independence from the Americans. (Duelfer has succeeded Kay in charge of what remains of the search for weapons in Iraq.) Later, Blix told Rice and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, point-blank, that “we would not allow ourselves to be an extended arm of the CIA.” In the end, however, the inspectors had less independence than Blix supposed.

British intelligence, and probably other spooks as well, was probably bugging his offices and the offices of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. This meant that while the CIA knew what Blix knew, he was never given access to what they knew. Had the CIA given him access to its ambiguous dossiers, Blix might have been tougher with the political leaders who kept trying to push him around. For if Blix had realized that the CIA had little or nothing that was certain, he would have been in a position to push against the political tide leading to war.

Instead, as the weapons failed to show up, Blix kept asking himself why German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Blair and Powell remained so sure that they would be found. The French intelligence services apparently told Blix that Hussein had weapons, but when Blix met Jacques Chirac on Jan. 17 -- around the time Chirac decided to veto the use of force -- the French president dismissed his own intelligence services with the remark that there was no “serious evidence” of weapons. When asked why all the Western intelligence services seemed to agree there was a threat, Chirac said dismissively, “They sometimes intoxicate each other.” Chirac turns out to have been right.

When Powell made the administration’s case for war in front of the Security Council, Blix realized that his inspectors had already been to the sites he named and had found nothing. Blix bluntly concludes: “Colin Powell had been charged with the thankless task of hauling out the smoking guns that in January were said to be irrelevant and that after March, turned out to be non-existent.”

Despite many trips to Baghdad, Blix never met Hussein and so has no answer to the key question: Why should a dictator without weapons pretend until it is too late that he has them? Critics of the war rightly focus on the mistakes of our leaders, and this book is a thorough inventory of these errors of judgment and presentation.

But the biggest mistake of all -- the single most important reason why war occurred -- was Hussein’s failure to declare that he didn’t have the weapons and then allow the inspectors free access to prove him right. Instead, he bluffed, believing that surrendering to inspections might ultimately dislodge him from power, and having bluffed, as he had done for 12 years, he did not realize in time that his bluff was being called. Blix’s book will provide lots of ammunition for critics of the Western leaders who called his bluff, but Blix is in no doubt that they were right to do so.

One vital message for American foreign policy comes out of the Blix book: U.N. weapons inspections work and they are the best hope we have of containing weapons of mass destruction. Instead of trashing the U.N., we need to give its professionals the resources to do the job. As Blix says, an inspection team of 200 people costing about $80 million a year may yield slow, even ambiguous results. But it is certainly cheaper than an invasion costing $80 billion.