Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004, pages 30-31, 94

United Nations

Frustrated Neocons, Former U.N. Weapons Head Blix Assess Year of War on Iraq

By Ian Williams

Former chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix (l) presents Secretary-General Kofi Annan with a copy of his book, Disarming Iraq, at United Nations headquarters in New York March 16 (Notimex/Foto/Dennis Callahan/Fre/Pol).

IT IS JUST OVER a year since the British and American delegations at the U.N. abandoned their attempt to bulldoze through a resolution authorizing their intended attack on Iraq. As we know, their failure to obtain U.N. approval did not deter them from launching the invasion anyway.

That means it also was just over a year since we heard fervently pro-Israel and anti-Iraq Richard Perle, one of the architects of this new world order, gloat, “Thank God the U.N. is dead.” As Hans Blix, then head of UNMOVIC, the U.N.’s weapons inspection program in Iraq, comments in his new book, Disarming Iraq, “It is an interesting notion that when a small minority has been rebuffed by a strong majority, it is the majority that has failed the test.”

We now know, of course, who has had the last sardonic laugh. In February, Perle resigned from the Defense Policy Board to protect the Bush administration from the near planetary distance between his pronouncements and reality. He earlier had to resign as chairman of the board because of seeming conflicts of interest.

However, as Mark Twain said on hearing reports that he was dead, rumors of the U.N.’s death were greatly exaggerated.With each passing month the reluctant majority on the Security Council is being vindicated and in March Spanish voters registered their opinion about Prime Minister José Maria Aznar, one of Bush’s few supporters abroad.

Former U.N. weapons inspector David Kay, who spent years deriding the organization for not being tough enough to find Iraqi weapons, reported to Congress after the best part of a year heading the American inspectors, backed up by hundreds of thousands of troops, that he had not been able to find any.

Those on the Security Council who opposed the invasion—and were vilified by Washington for doing so—are showing great forbearance in refraining from gloating that, exactly as they warned, the U.S. is mired in a low-intensity war with a steady stream of casualties.

The people around Perle are not taking this lying down, however. A stream of press reports emanating from those parts of the media which called for the invasion of Iraq are focusing on the alleged corruption of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food Program. Among the accusers are Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC)—who, come to think of it, may know something about corruption—and his old friends in The Wall Street Journal, the National Review and similar usual suspects. It is interesting that they have never pursued the much more substantial accusations that the Jordanian government has made against Chalabi for bank fraud.

True, there was a lot of corruption surrounding oil sales from Iraq under sanctions: more than half the illicit revenues its accusers hint the U.N. colluded at handing over to Saddam Hussain came from smuggling oil products to Jordan and Turkey, Baghdad having bribed northern Iraq’s Kurdish administration—now part of the IGC—to allow the traffic.

Neither the U.S. nor the UK tried to curtail the smuggling with their close allies Ankara and Amman, nor did they raise the issue with the U.N. Indeed, they waited until Syria became involved, following its rapprochement with its Ba’athist brethren in Baghdad, then tried to come down hard on Damascus. This, of course, had more to do with the latter’s relations with Israel than with any concern for the principle of smuggling.

In fact, the contracts for oil and food all were made by the Iraqi government and approved by the Security Council’s Sanctions Committee. The U.N.’s involvement was reduced to checking bills of lading at the frontiers.

His accusers say Kofi Annan’s son worked for the company that got the contract to run the checks at the Iraqi border, and so he did once—before it got the Iraq contract. At the end of the program, which fed most of the population of Iraq for many years, the program handed over billions of dollars remaining to the Iraqi Development Fund, run by the Coalition—which has yet to explain what it did with the money.

It may seem rich—the people who gave Halliburton uncontested contracts to rebuild Iraq complaining about U.N. corruption—but these people have chutzpah. It is even possible that some U.N. officials may have been bribed, but that is far from proven.

What is certain is that the people who are raising these hysterical objections have an agenda that has little to do with the Oil-For-Food Program or the welfare of the Iraqi people. Their previous motivations, current connections and the timing of their attacks point to two targets: firstly to “punish” Kofi Annan for his relative independence on Iraq, and reduce any chance that he would be asked to run for a third term in office.

Secondly, Perle, Chalabi and their fellow travelers seek to reduce the chances of the U.N. playing a meaningful role in Iraqi sovereignty—a role that certainly would inhibit the chances of Chalabi playing a major role in an independent Iraq, since it is clear that he has little or no constituency there.

Between them, these people resent the reality that,almost from the first weeks of the occupation, the Bush administration has been returning to the U.N., in increasingly humble fashion, for help in extricating itself from its hole in the sand. The previously sacred handover sequence that would allow President George W. Bush to declare victory (again) at the end of June and officially end the occupation has fallen down in the face of resistance by Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani—who, boringly enough, will take suggestions from the U.N. and Kofi Annan, but who refuses to deal directly with the occupying coalition.

Even after a year of resolutions that last year’s enemies, Germany, France and Russia, are helpfully and forgivingly supporting to help rebuild Iraq, there as yet has been no resolution that, even retrospectively, authorizes or legalizes the U.S. and British invasion or occupation. Indeed, most of them are careful to put the “Coalition” in the same category as the Israelis in the West Bank and Gaza—i.e., occupiers to whom the Geneva Conventions apply.

The issue is one of legitimacy. Along with the rest of the world, most Iraqi political figures want the blessing of the United Nations, which, in Kofi Annan’s words, has a “unique legitimacy.” Only the U.N. can take away the stigma of Quislinghood from any new Iraqi regime.

But the U.N.’s accusers, even if they do not want to challenge George Bush and Karl Rove in an election year on his change of tactics, still simmer with resentment that the U.N. has a new role, a year after they thought, along with Perle, that they had buried it at the crossroads.

A Profile in Courage

On the eve of the anniversary of the war on Iraq, Hans Blix came to the United Nations for a press conference and a book signing—and the event was almost like a popular demonstration in his support. In half an hour some 300 people had bought Disarming Iraq and lined up for the former head of UNMOVIC to sign it. As they did so, U.N. staff, ambassadors and others expressed their appreciation of his integrity and honesty. Apparently, telling the truth in these days is rare enough to earn special recognition, and, in a world short of heroes, the quietly spoken, avuncular Swede is what we get, a multilateral David against the unilateral Goliath. It was a sharp contrast to the Perles of this world.

His book’s conclusion is telling enough: “In March 2003, the policy of containment was abandoned in the case of Iraq...a combined U.N. and IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] inspection force of fewer than 200 inspectors costing perhaps $80 million a year was pushed out and replaced by an invasion force of some 300,000 costing approximately $80 billion a year.”

There is blame to spare, however. Why did Saddam Hussain try, in effect, to bluff the world that Iraq had weapons when it now appears it did not? Blix muses, “My first speculation is that while the U.N. resolutions would let off the sanctions provided he came clean on the weapons, he nevertheless would hear many times from the U.S. spokesman that only the disappearance of Saddam would lead to that result—that did not give him many incentives. So he felt he could play cat and mouse with the inspectors anyway—they did not have any importance.”

Alternatively, Blix continues, Saddam “might have put a sign on the door saying ”˜beware of the dog’ without having the dog. He might have then sent a signal to neighbors, who would think, ”˜Well, although he denied weapons, maybe they are there’ and he might look dangerous.”

His third suggestion, was fear of wounded pride: “to let inspectors into ministries, his own palaces and so forth.” Blix poses as a final possibility that Iraqis “knew that some of the UNSCOM inspectors had reported on military sites they saw directly to their authorities. And, perhaps, thereafter the sites could become bombing targets.”

His accusers, Blix notes, variously charged him with accelerating or slowing down the rush to war—which shows how much of a different universe he was in. “It was like reporting on the weather,” he explains. “If it is sunny, that’s what I report, and if later it snows, I report that as well.”

In these days of expedient reports, with civil servants and intelligence agencies rushing to feed their masters’ prejudices, such objectivity stands out. In fact, a thread throughout the book is “the lack of critical thinking” from the governments involved. In his book, Blix characterizes the Bush administration view as: “The witches exist: you are appointed to deal with these witches: testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt.”

In contrast, Blix cites French President Jacques Chirac asamong the first who doubted the intelligence reports about Saddam’s weapons, telling Blix that the agencies “intoxicate each other.” Blix recalls that his own first suspicions that Saddam might be telling the truth about destroying the WMDs was in January 2003: “We received tips about sites from Western intelligence agencies, and when we went to them we did not find any Weapons of Mass Destruction. Then we realized that, although this intelligence was the best they had, it did not give us anything.”

An optimist, Blix did not really give up hope that inspections could avert war until Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf “phoned and told us ”˜you better move out.”˜“

When probed at the seeming naïvety of ignoring the U.S. administration’s clear signals of war, Blix commented that “certainly Colin Powell was no more hawkish than [Madeleine] Albright at the beginning. I don’t think they had plans for occupation then, although it may have been in the formative stages. Nothing really happened until 9/11,” he explained. ”Without that they may have continued the policy of containment. But in that case I’m not sure the inspectors would have got in. It would not have happened easily without the military buildup.”

He compares the military plans that were afoot from summer 2002 with “laying railway tracks. You can build them, but the speed and route of the trains to run on them are still under control.”

While allowing the possibility that Blair and Bush were sincerely misled, and “intoxicated,” by their intelligence agencies, Blix is clear that the invasion was both unwise and illegal: “Saddam Hussain posed no threat to his neighbors, although he was indeed a terror to his own people.” In the end, he argues, “I don’t think that it is valid to maintain that these resolutions gave authority to individual members of the Security Council to go to war. I think the SC owns its resolutions and it was for the council to authorize action, not the individual states to arrogate themselves that authority.”

Blix nevertheless concludes that the whole sorry episode has several positive features. One of them, “it has to be admitted,” he says, “is the removal of Saddam Hussain.” The other is to reinforce the superiority of multilateral weapons inspections that can be independent, and produce findings that are not so likely to be, in the British phrase, “sexed up” by governments.

But, Blix concludes, those gains are outweighed by the “greater price” for the invasion, which he names in the final paragraph of Disarming Iraq: “in the compromised legitimacy of the action, in the damaged credibility of the governments pursuing it, and in the diminished authority of the United Nations.”

Ian Williams is a free-lance journalist based at the United Nations.

< Prev		Next >