Blix-krieg: How not to fight Saddam Hussein.(Brief Article)

Last February, Hans Blix, the United Nations arms-inspection chief who will, if the Security Council has its way, search Iraq for weapons of mass destruction, addressed a group of inspectors-in-training at a U.N. facility in Geneva. He gave a brief history of UNMOVIC -- the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission -- which he now heads and which will do the searches. After the history lesson, Blix got to a key issue: How should the inspectors conduct themselves inside Saddam Hussein's Iraq? "If I were to give some adjectives of what I believe would be desirable conduct, I would say driving and dynamic -- but not angry and aggressive," Blix said. Inspectors, he continued, should be "friendly, but not cozy" and "show respect for those you deal with, and demand respect for yourself." Finally, Blix advised, "A light tone or a joke may sometimes break a nervous atmosphere."

A decade earlier, on August 6, 1991, the Washington Post ran a story headlined "Baghdad Surreptitiously Extracted Plutonium; International Monitoring Apparently Failed." The story, and several subsequent reports, revealed that Saddam had put together a massive and sophisticated nuclear-weapons program virtually under the nose of one Hans Blix, who was then head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the group charged with monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. In the years leading up to 1991, Blix gave Saddam high marks for abiding by the treaty; the nuclear program was discovered in 1991 only after an Iraqi defector told authorities about it. Blix was stunned. "The system was not designed to pick this up," he told the Post.

Now Blix, a 74-year-old former Swedish diplomat, is preparing to take on perhaps the most important arms inspections ever. His critics point to the Iraqi nuclear fiasco and ask why a man who missed one of the most extensive illegal arms programs in recent years has been selected to conduct inspections in Iraq today. "He has a history of not being terribly aggressive," says Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control. "The Iraqis were given stars for good behavior, when in fact they were making bombs in the rooms next door to the ones the inspectors were going into." Two other nuclear-arms experts, Paul Leventhal and Steven Dolley of the Nuclear Control Institute, have written that while the best arms inspectors are "confrontational, refusing to accept Iraqi obfuscations and demanding evidence of destroyed weapons . . . IAEA was more accommodating, giving Iraqi nuclear officials the benefit of the doubt when they failed to provide evidence that all nuclear weapons components had been destroyed and all prohibited activities terminated."

Blix's critics also point to the way he got his current job as evidence that he is not the best choice for the weapons-inspection assignment. After heading the IAEA from 1981 until 1997, he was asked by the U.N. at ...