'Disarming Iraq': Lack of Evidence

April 11, 2004 'Disarming Iraq': Lack of Evidence By Fareed Zakaria DISARMING IRAQ, by Hans Blix. 285 pp. New York: Pantheon Books. $24. At several points in ''Disarming Iraq,'' Hans Blix admits that he too assumed Saddam Hussein's regime was concealing weapons of mass destruction. But, he explains, ''I needed evidence.'' His frustration with the Bush administration, expressed throughout this book, was that it was both supremely confident that the weapons existed and utterly uninterested in evidence. Indeed, the administration was deeply mistrustful of Blix's search for it. Washington's logic, he writes, appeared similar to that of witch hunting in the Middle Ages. ''The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt.'' Blix was puzzled that this certainty about the weapons was combined with absolutely no real information about where they might be. He repeatedly complained to senior American officials that the intelligence was meager or simply bad. The sites they directed him to rarely yielded anything. The evidence Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell cited publicly Blix knew to be dubious. And yet Blix also believed that the witches existed. He suspected that the Iraqis were hiding weapons and weapons programs. He came to this conclusion on the basis of the same logic -- a lack of evidence. In 1991 the United Nations had found vast stockpiles of chemical and biological agents in the country. Iraq claimed to have destroyed them but had never presented a single piece of evidence that it had done so. If they had destroyed them, Blix wondered, why did they not ''try to convince us of this in 2002 and 2003. . . . Had there really been no written orders issued in 1991? . . . Why was the Iraqi side so late in presenting . . . lists of people who they claimed had taken part in the destruction of prohibited items in 1991? Why did they not present these people for interviews in December 2002?'' Thus in his first report to the Security Council, in January 2003, Blix declared, ''Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance -- not even today -- of the disarmament which was demanded of it and which it needs to carry out to win the confidence of the world.'' ''Disarming Iraq'' can be read as an attempt by an honorable international civil servant to steer between two realities: on the one hand, an American administration that had made up its mind to go to war no matter what; on the other, an Iraqi regime that never cooperated enough to ease the world's suspicions. Blix writes in a straightforward, honest style, with his distinctive, low-key (dare one say Swedish?) personality coming through. He is never outraged, often ''surprised,'' ''puzzled'' or ''troubled.'' His book is a detailed history of the diplomacy surrounding what turned out to be the last United Nations inspections in Iraq. It's an important addition to the historical record, though it contains more about Unmovic than most readers will want to know. (That's United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspections Commission.) Blix provides few interesting character sketches and says little that is surprising about the Bush administration. He speaks admiringly of Colin Powell, feels that he was always treated courteously by Condoleezza Rice and writes less charitably of Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. He recalls a meeting with Cheney at which the vice president tried to intimidate him, threatening to ''discredit inspections in favor of disarmament'' if he did not produce quick results. More revealing are Blix's difficulties with the Iraqis. Time and again he and his colleague Mohamed ElBaradei tried to explain to the Iraqis that they needed to cooperate for the inspections to confirm what they claimed -- that they had no weapons of mass destruction. After repeated requests to talk to Saddam Hussein, which were turned down, Blix and ElBaradei met with the Iraqi vice president (a powerless Hussein stooge). At that meeting, ElBaradei sternly explained that it was ''incomprehensible'' that Iraq had not taken the steps the United Nations had demanded. There was no response. Later, in February 2003, as the United States made clear that time was running out, several countries proposed ways of testing Iraqi cooperation. One was that Saddam Hussein give a televised speech promising full cooperation with inspections so that everyone in the country heard it from the top. Another was a timeline for inspections with clear benchmarks. Almost every country got seriously interested in these proposals. But there was no response from Iraq. It was behavior like this that led Blix and many others to assume that the Iraqis were not coming clean because they had something to hide. Blix is unsparing of the United States in his concluding sections. He points out that virtually every claim made by American policy makers about Iraq's weapons programs -- aluminum tubes, yellowcake, mobile labs -- has proved to be false. The entire assessment of Iraq's weapons program, he argues, lacked any kind of ''critical thinking.'' In addition ''the contempt which both Vice President Cheney and the leadership in the U.S. Department of Defense appear to have held for international inspections deprived them, in effect, of a valuable source of information.'' Everyone recognizes the need for human intelligence in societies like Saddam Hussein's. Well, the inspectors, who met with Iraqi officials, traveled around the country and inspected sites, were human intelligence. Iraq was a hard case. Not only was it one of the most closed states in the world. It had a history of pursuing weapons of mass destruction, and had used them twice, against the Kurds and the Iranians. From the mid-1970's through the early 90's, Iraq continuously, persistently and ambitiously sought nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. All Western intelligence services underestimated the extent of these efforts. International agencies, chiefly the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Hans Blix, actually gave Iraq a clean bill of health during these decades. As a result, everyone, including Blix, was wary of Iraq's declarations that it had destroyed its old stockpiles and wasn't building new ones. But something changed around the early 90's inside Iraq. Perhaps the regime became dysfunctional, or the inspections worked, or the bombing and sanctions took their toll or something else. But at that point, Iraq appears to have quietly thrown in the towel. Blix speculates that the Iraqis did not reveal this to the world for several reasons: the Americans seemed dead set against them anyway; national pride; they wanted to scare their neighbors (''like someone who puts up a sign warning BEWARE OF DOG without having a dog''). Whatever it was, the United States -- and most of the world -- missed it. But if getting Iraq right was tough, getting the diplomacy right was much easier. Reading this book one is struck by how, at the end, the United States had become uninterested in diplomacy, viewing it as an obstacle. It seems clear that with a little effort Washington could have worked through international structures and institutions to achieve its goals in Iraq. Blix and ElBaradei were proving to be tough, honest taskmasters. Every country -- yes, even France -- was coming around to the view that the inspections needed to go on for only another month or two, that benchmarks could have been established, and if the Iraqis failed these tests the Security Council would authorize war. But in a fashion that is almost reminiscent of World War I, the Pentagon's military timetables drove American diplomacy. The weather had become more important than international legitimacy. Had Washington made more of a commitment to diplomacy, Saddam Hussein would probably still have been deposed. Blix's book provides ample evidence that the Iraqis would most likely not have met the tests required of them. But the war would have been authorized by the Security Council, had greater international support and involved much more burden sharing. Countries like India and Pakistan, with tens of thousands of troops to provide, made it clear that they needed a United Nations mandate to go into Iraq. The Europeans and Japanese (who now pay for at least as much of the reconstruction of Afghanistan as the United States does) would similarly have been more generous in Iraq than they are today. Most important, the rebuilding of Iraq would be seen not as an American imperial effort but as an international project, much like those in Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and even Afghanistan. America is paying a price in credibility for its mishandling of Iraq. But the real price is being paid by the Iraqi people, whose occupation has been far more lonely and troubled than it needed to be. Fareed Zakaria is the editor of Newsweek International and the author of ''The Future of Freedom.''