Current AffairsOn February 8th last year the world waited for his verdict. Every news channel had its cameras trained on the shy, cuddly, septuagenarian as he pushed through the lines of observers to deliver the crucial judgment to the UN Security Council in New York.
On a similar occasion three weeks earlier, Hans Blix had redeemed himself in the eyes of a suspicious Bush administration by delivering an interim report highly critical of the Iraqi government. Now the Washington hawks waited for the killer blow, the denouement which would trigger war.
They had grounds for confidence, since Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, had just made a dramatic presentation to the same council of the smoking guns which pointed to the deadly weapons and chemicals Saddam had hidden from Blix's well-meaning but naïve inspectors. But not from the penetrating gaze of US intelligence, it was claimed.
For three years, the former Swedish diplomat headed the UN inspection committee in its most critical period for its credibility as a competent and impartial agent of the UN. Since 1992, the committee's precursor, UNSCOM, had covered itself in some ignominy for its partisan view of its role, and the leaky habits which indicated a bias towards US security interests.
Blix had accepted the job reluctantly, he tells us, wishing instead to retire quietly with his ambassador wife and write his memoirs. And that is where we join the author and his wife, on vacation in Patagonia, taking the call from Kofi Anan which ended his holiday and brought him suddenly out of retirement. Thereafter, the story moves chronologically, from a discussion of the efforts to disarm Iraq in the 10 years after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to the outbreak of "shock and awe", in Donald Rumsfeld's boastful tag, in March of last year.
The book gives us a detailed account of the progress and, ultimately, the failure of UN diplomacy during the three years of Blix's stewardship. But if the UN failed to resolve the problem of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, it is clear that the responsibility did not lie with the inspectors or the Security Council. As we know now, the weapons were not found because they were not there.
Four months after the war, an exhaustive study by the Washington Carnegie Endowment gave some quiet satisfaction to the author - retired once more and now back in his Stockholm apartment. US and British experts were hastily dispatched to Iraq after the war in order to find the weapons which would justify it and vilify Hans Blix. The Carnegie report concludes that their efforts only served to vindicate him and his colleagues.
"It appears", the authors state, "that the inspection process was working, and if it had been given enough time and enough resources, could have continued to work and effectively stymied and prevented any new Iraqi efforts on weapons of mass destruction. Never have so few been criticised by so many with so little justification."
When Blix gave his final verdict to the Security Council on Iraqi compliance with the demands of the UN, it brought a collective sigh of relief to most of the world, and apoplexy to the American and British governments. This was no great surprise to the author, who was too long accustomed to the sniping of neo- conservatives in and around the Bush camp to be surprised now at their reaction to his even-handed presentation.
A year before the war, Donald Rumsfeld had rubbished the inspectors in a phrase of delicious clumsiness: "For the most part anything they found was a result of having been cued to something as a result of a defector giving them a heads-up." There were false allegations of homosexuality and CIA attempts to smear him at the behest of Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of defence. According to press reports cited by Blix, Wolfowitz feared that his inspection team could "torpedo" US plans for military action.
Now that the cuddly Swede is safely back in Stockholm with his torpedo decommissioned, with the war over and the weapons still missing, Wolfowitz feels it is time to move on. Weapons of mass destruction? They went for the weapons issue, he says now, "for bureaucratic reasons . . . because it was the one reason everyone could agree on".
So what was the real reason? Was it a policy decision made for geopolitical reasons years before, as many commentators would have it? Was it decided nine months before the war, making a sham of the diplomacy mandated by the UN? Blix asserts that nothing was predetermined, but his overall argument weakens this claim.
If Hans Blix feels the anger shared by many at the way he personally and his inspection team were undermined by the US and UK, he does not reveal it in this book. In an interview with the Guardian shortly after the war, he spoke more frankly of the "bastards who spread things around . . . who planted nasty things in the media". A little less discretion here might have made for a better book. While the book will be an invaluable resource to historians of the period, its diary form does not make for an easy read; and the story might have flowed more fluently if the author had not made the conscious decision to balance his strongly felt criticism of his US opponents with implausible concessions to the other point of view.
Bill McSweeney teaches International Politics at the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin
Disarming Iraq: The Search for Weapons of Mass Destruction By Hans Blix Bloomsbury, 285pp. £16.99