Hans Blix doesn't like to shout but he carries a big stick: the authority of the Security Council. Can the 74-year-old diplomat succeed in Iraq? Oliver Burkeman assesses the man and his task
There are many glamorous jobs in international diplomacy, but being a UN weapons inspector is not one of them. Those who took part last time remember the endless frustrations thrown up by their reluctant Iraqi hosts - the bugged hotels, the hostile minders, the suspicious traffic-jams en route to chemical facilities, the laboratory doors that could only be unlocked by officials who were, sadly, unavailable.
"One individual, by our calculations, had three weddings in the space of a few weeks," says Mr David Kay, who headed nuclear inspections for the UN. Another inspector remembers an official throwing documents into the street, where they were picked up by a colleague who jumped on to a bus. A UN worker scrambled outside, blocking the vehicle, but it drove on; fearing for his life, he leapt for the kerb.
So perhaps there is a masochistic streak in Mr Hans Blix, the 74-year-old Swedish diplomat who is about to go through all this again as chief inspector for the UN's Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic). There will be far more at stake this time: it will be up to Mr Blix to judge if the Iraqis are guilty of obstructing inspections, and therefore it is no exaggeration to say that the future of Iraq will rest largely with him. If he maintains that Baghdad is co-operating, Washington could, of course, overrule him and go to war - but only at great cost to its international support.
The past record of the inspectors is unlikely to fill Mr Blix with eager anticipation. When they were withdrawn, in 1998, it was because of Iraqi intransigence. However, by then the system had collapsed into bitter recriminations between Unmovic's predecessor, Unscom, and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which oversaw the nuclear part of the process.
To say that Mr Blix keeps himself to himself would be an understatement. During two recent days of talks with the Iraqis in Vienna, he dined alone at the drab hotel restaurant next to the UN's offices on both nights, despite, presumably, having made friends and acquaintances there during his 16 years at the IAEA.
His supporters and opponents agree he is a hardworking man of conservative habits with a conservative approach to diplomacy.
"He's a very courtly gentleman, a lawyer who has a tremendous respect for international agreements, norms and law," says Mr Robert Einhorn, assistant-secretary for non-proliferation in the Bill Clinton and early George W. Bush administrations. "He believes, I think, that the Security Council's ability to enforce compliance in Iraq is a crucial test . . . and that the stakes are high, both for the future of international arms agreements and the UN."
Mr Kay - who resigned from Unscom after falling out with Mr Blix's IAEA over a stand-off with the Iraqis in the car-park of a facility they were inspecting - puts it somewhat differently. "His view is of sovereign states, all of whom deserve equal respect. He does not make distinctions between good guys and bad guys, between people who have invaded countries versus those who have defended them," he says.
"He's very concerned with perceived fairness. I've always said he'd be better as a bankruptcy lawyer. Or a divorce attorney."
Ultimately, the US decision on whether to go to war could come down to a single locked gate in the Iraqi desert, or one door to which the key could not be immediately located. One Unscom alumnus says he watched satellite footage of an inspection "and you can literally see the Iraqis moving the stuff out of the side entrance while Unscom was at the front" negotiating over a key.
"Blix doesn't want to be blamed for going to war," says Mr David Albright, a former IAEA consultant who took part in the inspections and is now president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. "But in my view, there's nothing wrong with having somebody there who can get through locked doors, and I'm not sure Blix would agree with that. You've got to use investigative techniques like the police do. Blix comes from an environment where the nation state is supreme, but this is a criminal state, Iraq, where you have to use lock-pickers, or people who can retrieve information from computers if it's just been erased."
And so Mr Kay, for one, says he "recoiled" a week ago when Mr Blix told the Security Council he would report "only significant results", rather than every tiny act of Iraqi recalcitrance. "If you have any hope of getting co-operation from the Iraqis, you don't tell them what they can do to frustrate you that won't be called an obstruction," Mr Kay says. "I used to loudly tell the Iraqis I would report them to the Security Council. It was the only force I had available. I think he's just handed them a large salami slicer to slice away at the inspections regime."
Mr Blix addressed the dilemma at a news conference last month. "What works best as a matter of psychology: shouting, or soft speaking with some leverage? Well, I don't know. My habit is not to shout."
BY all accounts Sweden's foreign service is a place of intense political rivalries. Mr Blix - who was born in 1928 in the ancient Swedish university town of Uppsala and entered the service, after an academic career, in 1963 - soon found himself in competition with another diplomat seven years his junior, Mr Rolf Ekeus. Perhaps fatally for the first round of inspections, Mr Ekeus would go on to become the chair of Unscom, while Mr Blix was at the helm of the IAEA.
Mr Kay remembers having to call his opposite number at the IAEA after Mr Blix and Mr Ekeus had exchanged chilly phone calls. "We used to joke that everything would be OK if we could only keep them from talking in Swedish," he says. "We'd be sitting there mute, each listening to one side of a conversation in Swedish, and then we'd have to get on the phone to each other and straighten everything out."
Mr Blix was not the US's first choice for the post he now holds, Mr Ekeus was. The Clinton administration viewed the younger Swede as made of tougher stuff, and it hardly helped that Mr Blix had been forced to admit that, before the Gulf war, President Saddam had hidden an advanced nuclear development programme from the IAEA during his tenure there. But France and Russia fiercely opposed Mr Ekeus, hoping for a gentler approach and fearing Iraq would never co-operate with someone so closely associated with Unscom. Mr Blix was the compromise candidate.
It is a safe bet there will be no provocative posturings when the Unmovic inspectors move into Iraq. "We certainly feel there is a right to undertake inspections on a Friday, or on a holiday or during the night," Mr Blix has said, "but we do not see any need to undertake any unnecessary provocations." Deciding where to draw the line could be tricky, though. It's unclear, for example, whether he would tolerate something like Mr Kay's surprise inspection of the Al Fallujah military facility in 1991.
"I played on the fact that most people who learn a foreign language don't master the prepositions," Mr Kay says. "So I told the Iraqis we wanted to go 'towards' a different facility, not 'to' it. The road took us past Al Fallujah, and we made a 180-degree turn across a divided highway and pulled up at the gate."
The facility's guards prevaricated, claiming they would have to contact Baghdad for authority to admit them, but did not stop inspectors climbing up a nearby water tower. "Ninety seconds later, we could see huge tank transporters moving out the back gate carrying calutrons". These are used to enrich uranium for nuclear bombs.
Either way, Mr Blix's job is not one to envied. Too great a degree of perceived closeness to Iraq or to the US, for example, could be fatal. It is, finally, impossible to see how he can even attempt tocomplete his task without becoming the subject of scathing criticism, whether for helping precipitate a devastating war, or for ensuring the survival of a dangerous tyrant.