Hans the Irrelevant
By Gary Milhollin
The
Wall Street Journal
January 28, 2003, p. A16
Imagine this: Hans
Blix, the 74-year-old Swedish lawyer who now serves as chief U.N. weapons
inspector in Iraq, after drawing himself up to his full
height, declares: "I'm not taking it anymore."
After being fooled in the 1980s (when Saddam ran a secret A-bomb program under the noses of Mr. Blix's inspectors at the International Atomic Energy Agency) and fooled again in the 1990s (when Saddam destroyed entire buildings to hide evidence of bomb making) and then brushed off last month when Saddam's minions handed Mr. Blix a 12,000-page report in which none of his questions were answered - it would be normal to be upset and even, maybe, to reach for Saddam's throat.
Yet, Mr. Blix,
an infinitely patient international civil servant, could
never bring himself to do so - at least consciously. But yesterday,
in an
extraordinary report to the United Nations, he did so unconsciously.
In the
most careful, lawyerly fashion, Mr. Blix unwittingly demonstrated that
his
efforts are leading nowhere, and that his mission is essentially over.
He did not, of
course, say that in so many words. At first, he congratulated
the Iraqis for their cooperation on "process": "It would
appear from our experience so far that Iraq has decided in principle
to provide cooperation on process, notably access. A similar decision
is indispensable to provide cooperation on substance in order to bring
the disarmament task to completion, through the peaceful process of
inspection, and to bring the monitoring task on a firm course."
All lawyers (Mr. Blix is a lawyer) know the difference between process and substance. By "process" he meant letting U.N. inspectors tour some 230 suspected weapon sites, almost all of which had been visited already by previous groups of inspectors. By "substance" he meant real disarmament, toward which he had to admit that the Iraqis still have done virtually nothing.
"One might have expected," Mr. Blix wrote, that Iraq would have explained the following:
- Evidence that
it had tried to put VX, the deadliest form of nerve gas,
into weapon-usable form.
- One thousand tons of poison gas contained in 6,500 missing chemical bombs.
- Several thousand missing rocket warheads for carrying poison gas.
- Some 8,500 missing liters of anthrax and enough growth media to produce 5,000 liters more.
- The illegal import
of 300 rocket engines and other components for
ballistic missiles.
- Illegal tests
of long-range missiles that Iraq is not supposed to
possess.
- Three-thousand
pages of undeclared documents on the enrichment of
uranium at the home of an Iraqi nuclear-weapon scientist.
This is a terrifying
list of destructive potential to leave in the hands of
someone like Saddam Hussein. Failing to account for it is a lack of
cooperation on "substance," and surely a material breach of
Iraq's
obligations. But Mr. Blix is unable to say so. The report deliberately
avoids taking any position on this point. The implication, however,
is
clear: With no progress on substance - that is, disarmament - the cooperation
on process is irrelevant.
Mr. Blix's only
prescription for solving this problem is to give the
inspections more time. But that makes no sense in light of what he has
reported. It is, the U.N. chief inspector says, the lack of a decision
by
the Iraqi government to disarm that is the stumbling block. "Iraq
appears
not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament
which was demanded of it."
Making a decision
doesn't take long, especially in a dictatorship. Giving
the inspectors more time has nothing to do with complying with U.N.
Resolution 1441. The truth is that Mr. Blix's mission so far has not
produced any progress toward disarmament, and is not likely to do so
in the future.
What, then, can
we expect to happen next? If the inspectors find more
evidence that Saddam is lying - more evidence of hidden warheads or
illegal imports, for example - it will only prove more clearly that
disarmament isn't taking place. Obviously, this has nothing to do with
achieving the peaceful disarmament Mr. Blix hopes to achieve. On the
other hand, if the inspectors fail to find more evidence, that will
not prove that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction as long as Saddam
refused to account for the frightening list of missing items.
The only hope for
inspections now is the last-minute conversion of Saddam
Hussein. If troops begin massing on his border, there is a slim chance
that
Saddam will start answering Mr. Blix's questions. There is even less
of a
chance that Saddam will then begin to transparently disarm. But if he
does,
the "process" will be unmistakable. The world would then see
Iraq behaving like South Africa when it revealed its entire nuclear-weapons
program after its government changed; and as Argentina and Brazil did
when they decided to become part of the solution to the proliferation
problem rather than part of the cause; and as Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan
did when they decided that nuclear weapons were not worth the cost of
their keeping.
If that time should
ever come, Mr. Blix may have a useful role to play. Then
he could verify that disarmament was happening, as inspections are supposed
to do, rather than trying to create disarmament, which inspections cannot
do. In the meantime, however, he should admit what he has so ably proved
in his report: His mission has been completed.
Mr. Milhollin directs the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control in Washington.