The Blix Option

Anyone trying to make some sense out of the intricate Iraqi crisis cannot ignore the statements and evaluations made by the lead actors in this crisis. Hans Blix continues to be one of them, even though he is officially off the stage, so to speak.

At the time when The UN Security Council was discussing the violation of its resolutions by Saddam Hussein's regime and the appropriate measures to be taken in this respect, Hans Blix was in a privileged, yet hardly enviable position. Privileged because he was one of the few Westerners able to enter Iraq and ask one of the most fearsome dictators of this century to account for his deeds. As head of the UN inspectors, he was also the man whose words bore a great deal of influence on the decisions made by great powers such as The US, Russia, China, France and Britain. Hardly enviable because, besides the risks of his field missions, the pressures made by the great powers turned his mission from a technical one into a political one. Determined to take direct action, The Bush Administration was expecting him to be the trigger of such action, to produce evidence that WMD existed or at least causes for "reasonable doubt' as to the sincerity of the Iraqi regime, which had repeatedly sworn that such weapons did not exist. On the other side, France and Russia - both of which had major economic contracts in progress in Saddam's Iraq - wanted to preserve the status quo. In other words, they wanted a Hans Blix who would keep going back and forth between Baghdad and UN in order to avoid a military conflict and the removal of Saddam's regime. This Swedish diplomat with an exceptional career, a law degree from Columbia University and a PhD from Cambridge, who had been Foreign minister of his country and had amassed a tremendous experience within The UN over nearly three decades, and who had been the head of The International Atomic Energy Agency between 1981 and 1997, could not avert the rupture between The US on the one side and France, Russia and Germany on the other.

Even today, Blix admits that Saddam's regime had the necessary infrastructure and expertise to produce chemical and biological weapons. Such infrastructure could not be completely destroyed or controlled because of the dual nature of the substances and materials required for producing WMD (they can be used for both civilian and military purposes at the same time). In other words, the danger of WMD existing and possibly being used in a conflict was real and not made up by the Americans or someone else. On the other hand, he continues to defend the stand he took at the peak of the political confrontation within The UN: it was possible to contain Saddam by continuous inspections and massive political pressures from abroad. In other words, the military intervention was uncalled for, at least under the argument that WMD actually existed. Which is precisely what France and Russia had been saying. Soon after the conflict began, Blix' stand was backed by the fact that the troops deployed in Iraq were unable to find any trace of WMD. More recently, Blix' stand has been reinforced by the critical evaluations of the quality of the information provided by American and British intelligence.

However, the matter of The UN's role in Iraq did not end upon the beginning of the allied military operations. On the contrary, this matter is more sensitive today than it ever was then. In the meantime, even The US has changed its approach, by starting to regard The UN as an essential factor in stabilizing Iraq after the transfer of authority to a local government at the end of this month. How The UN may assume the role of a guarantor of normalization after the withdrawal of the allied troops by the end of this year remains a crucial question that no one has been able to answer convincingly so far. Neither politically nor technically!

If, at the end of the Iraqi crisis, the world has one less dictator, a UN strengthened in its role of international security authority and one less open conflict, then we may consider that the Blix option is, after all, the best.

However, if the outcome of this crisis is just another compromise which the current US Administration is trying to get out of as clean as possible in order not to jeopardize its chances in the elections this fall, a compromise that fuels the revanchist spirit of those who regard themselves as competitors of The US internationally, a compromise that leaves Iraq being grinded by a bloody battle ending with another totalitarian regime based on religious fundamentalism or just armed power, then the Blix option is just another name for an international failure whose dramatic consequences will soon surface.