Disarming Iraq - Rilegato

Hans Blix was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency from 1981 to 1997 and was a member of Sweden’s delegation to the United Nations from 1961 to 1981. From 2000 to 2003, he was the executive director of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), supervising international inspections for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until the inspections were suspended in March 2003. Blix has been named chairman of the newly formed International Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction, which began its work in January 2004. He lives in Sweden.

Chapter 1

Disarming Iraq:

Moments of Truth? Invasion Instead of Inspection

On the afternoon of Sunday, March 16, 2003, I was in my office on the thirty-first floor of the United Nations Secretariat building in New York, the headquarters of the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission for Iraq (UNMOVIC). Some of my close collaborators had joined me to put the final touches on a work program I was to submit to the Security Council.

When our commission was established by a Security Council resolution in December 1999, the Council had recognized that there might still be weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq, despite the fact that a great deal of disarmament had been accomplished through UN inspections after the end of the Gulf War in 1991. In November 2002, a new round of inspections had been initiated to identify key remaining tasks in the disarming of Iraq.

Although the inspection organization was now operating at full strength and Iraq seemed as determined to give it prompt access everywhere, the United States appeared determined to replace our inspection force with an invasion army. After the terror attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, a policy of containment-keeping Saddam Hussein in his box-and ensuring the disarmament of Iraq through UN inspections was deemed no longer acceptable.

The people around me were all solid professionals coming from different parts of the world. There was Dimitri Perricos, probably the world's most experienced inspector. A Greek and by profession a chemist, he had more than twenty years of experience with international nuclear inspections-in Iraq, North Korea, South Africa and many other places. He was the head of operations. Muttusamy Sanmuganathan, known to all as Sam, was from Sri Lanka. Both Dimitri and Sam had worked closely with me for many years in Vienna, when I was the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Ewen Buchanan, a Scot, was our manager of media relations and institutional memory. For years he had been a political expert and the spokesman of the previous inspection authority, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM). There was Torkel Stiernlöf, who had been stationed in Baghdad and knew Arabic. He was about to return to his job at the foreign ministry in Stockholm after six intense months as my executive assistant. Lastly, there was Torkel's successor, Olof Skoog, an ambassador at the early age of 35 and on loan to me.

The military invasion of Iraq was all but announced and here we were at the UN sketching a peaceful way to try to ensure the country's disarmament! The military force, whose buildup had begun in the summer of 2002 and had been an essential reason why Iraq had accepted the inspectors back, had reached invasion strength and was now waiting to be deployed.

In the Security Council, all efforts to reach agreement on what might be demanded of Iraq in the next few weeks had collapsed. Proposals had been made by the British that Saddam Hussein should go before Iraqi television and declare his determination to disarm and to cooperate fully with the inspectors. The declaration would be accompanied by Iraq's fulfillment of a number of specific disarmament tasks within a very short time-perhaps ten days. (The approach had some similarity to the British efforts which ten months later would prompt Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi, to declare that Libya was stopping all efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction and would open up for thorough inspection.) The U.S./UK would consider themselves authorized to take armed action against Iraq if they determined that Iraq was in non-fulfillment of the demands.

While the guidelines in the December 1999 UNMOVIC resolution were perfectly valid and called for a work program covering a first period of 120 days of inspections, the U.S., the UK and Spain had been taking their cues from Security Council Resolution 1441, adopted on November 8, 2002. In their reading, this resolution gave Iraq only a limited time and a last opportunity to cooperate to attain disarmament or else face "serious consequences." That limited time, in their view, had now expired. Others in the Security Council thought the process of inspections required more time. They were not ready, at this stage, to authorize "serious consequences"-armed action. Most member states of the Council were of the view that such a decision was for the Council collectively, not for individual members, as the U.S. and the UK insisted.

On this Sunday, U.S. president George W. Bush, British prime minister Tony Blair and Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar Lopez had met for an hour on the Azores islands in the middle of the Atlantic and, for the record, made a last appeal to reluctant members of the Security Council to go along with the draft resolution on Iraq. Blair had stressed that they had gone an extra mile for peace, but Bush seemed already to be describing the blessings that would follow from armed action.

Most observers felt the war was now a certainty-and, indeed, it came. Although I thought the probability was very high, I was also, even at this very late date, aware that unexpected things can happen. I remembered how, in July 1991, after confrontations, the Iraqis had sent the IAEA a note admitting that they had tried several methods of enriching uranium. In October 1998, Kofi Annan, the secretary general of the United Nations, had secured an important concession from Iraq, prompting U.S. president Bill Clinton to call back bombers that had been sent to punish Iraq for its lack of cooperation. If, in the current situation, Saddam Hussein had made the kind of dramatic speech the British suggested, and offered quickly to solve a number of issues, there might well have been a suspension of the marching and flying orders and, instead, intensified inspections. Saddam did make a speech on his son's television channel, but it was not the dramatic gesture that the situation called for. In it, he noted that Iraq had had weapons of mass destruction in the past, but that it had none now.

As we were sitting around the table in my office, the telephone rang. It was Assistant Secretary of State John Wolf in Washington, calling to advise me that it was time to withdraw our inspectors from Iraq. No further notice would be issued and expeditious action was suggested.

Preparations for the Withdrawal of Inspectors

We had been preparing for this situation since the end of February, and in the previous few weeks had deliberately decreased the total number of our staff in Iraq. The chartered helicopters had already been removed by their owners. We had one airplane sitting in Baghdad and another was chartered to enable us to assist the UN by airlifting staff dealing with humanitarian assistance. Jeeps and buses for land transport would also be available, if this were to prove necessary.

It was now around 3 p.m. this Sunday in New York, and 11 p.m. in Baghdad. If Dr. Miroslav Gregovic, the head of our mission in Baghdad, were instructed immediately, the first planeload of staff would leave Baghdad the following morning. I was anxious to bring the people for whom I was responsibile to security as soon as possible. However, I was not the only one with responsibility. As secretary general, Kofi Annan had the highest managerial responsibility for all UN staff in Iraq. My colleague Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the IAEA, was responsible for the nuclear inspectors in Baghdad. I phoned both. Mohamed did not want to hasten the process. He was anxious that the withdrawal should not look like a retreat.

Although the secretary general did not need permission from the Security Council to issue an order of withdrawal, he wanted to inform the Council before he gave the instruction. He decided that he would do so at a meeting the Council was scheduled to hold on Monday morning. This meant that the withdrawal could not take place until Tuesday morning. I was not happy about the delay, but I assumed Kofi had reasons to be confident that this delay did not increase the risks.

Security Council, March 17: Resolution Authorizing War Withdrawn from Vote

Our inspectors in Iraq continued to work on Monday, March 17. They supervised the destruction of two Al Samoud 2 missiles, bringing the total number destroyed to seventy-two. They conducted a private interview with a biological scientist, bringing the total number of such private interviews to eleven. Inspection teams visited a dairy factory 140 kilometers north of Baghdad and two sites northwest of Baghdad. I worried about the risk of any hitches in the arrangements for their withdrawal on Tuesday morning. We had earlier received assurances from the Iraqi side, but I remembered that, in 1990, hostages had been taken.

The Security Council met at 10 a.m. To my dismay, Kofi Annan did not announce the withdrawal of UN staff from Iraq. It was already 6 p.m. in Baghdad and every hour's delay in issuing instructions from New York would make the preparations for departure more difficult.

The tone in the Council was not combative or acrimonious. The struggle was over. The path of inspection had been blocked by the U.S., the UK and Spain, and a resolution implicitly blessing armed intervention had been blocked by the majority of states in the Security Council. The Azores meeting and all the working of telephones during the weekend had not brought any change in the positions of governments. The UK said that the draft resolution, which it had sponsored in the Council, would not be put to a vote. This was a tacit admission that it could not have passed. If the resolution had been submitted to a vote and rejected, the negative vote would have further undermined the doubtful claim by the sponsors that earlier resolutions by the Council authorized them to use armed force if and when they deemed that Iraq was in non-fulfillment.

Even though the UK and the U.S. pointed to the threat of a veto from France as the reason for this debacle-ignoring the possibility tha...