Nelson Ascher wrote to recommend I fisk this article by Hans Blix in The Guardian (where else?). I thought the smarmy former UN chief weapons inspector had been sufficiently pilloried by some snarky filmmakers, but I figured “what the hey?”… I had an hour to kill before lunch with an old publisher friend. I would take a look. Blix begins:
The results of a review of the functioning of the UN, conducted by a panel appointed by the secretary general Kofi Annan, will soon be on the table. That there is a need to discuss an array of questions is not in doubt – but the fact that the most powerful member of the organisation shows disdain for it is not exactly conducive to a positive intergovernmental debate.
We learned before the invasion of Iraq that in the view of the US administration, the security council had the choice of voting with the US for armed action – or being irrelevant.
What?!… Slow down, hee-haw, whoa… What we learned was that members of the UN security council itself–notably Russia, China and France–were bought and paid for by Saddam Hussein to the tune, so far, of twenty-three billion bucks. That’s the biggest bribe in the history of known bribes by a factor of what? Ten? Twenty? A thousand? Beats me, but I do know that it is sufficient to make the entire security council itself irrelevant as a deliberative body.
I could go on but…sorry, I give up. I don’t have time to waste on Blix. I’d rather take a walk down Madison Avenue than read the rest of his article, let alone fisk him. I only have one question for the former weapons inspector. Mr. Blix, where do you bank?
UPDATE: Sorry, been away from the computer for several hours. Didn’t realize Blix link was broken. Fixed now.
Reading these attacks on Blix, you’d never know that he was 100% correct, not Powell and Rice.
I applaud your keeping the Oil for Food scandal an active topic but these attacks on Blix as though it’s still 2002 only detract from your credibility. The guy was right. In fact, as much as it kills me to say this, Scott freaking Ritter was right.
Now, if you want a _fun_ article from the Guardian to fisk, try
this one
i like the “where do you bank?” question. it is, frankly, the most relevant question we should be asking, instead of getting mired in philosophy, policy, politics, and so on. for english politicians, guardian reporters, and security council nations, it is money, pure money, that decides their position. how many others have the same commitment–they talk a big game, but it’s the bottom line that counts.
Yes Otter
Of course Scott Ritter was right, twice in fact, just like a stopped watch. When he resigned from the UN inspection team his resignation letter (1998) said
“The Special Commission was created for the
purpose of disarming Iraq. As part of the Special Commission team, I
have worked to achieve a simple end: the removal, destruction or
rendering harmless of Iraq’s proscribed weapons. The sad truth is that
Iraq today is not disarmed . . . UNSCOM has good reason to believe that
there are significant numbers of proscribed weapons and related
components and the means to manufacture such weapons unaccounted for in
Iraq today. . . Iraq has lied to the Special Commission and the world
since day one concerning the true scope and nature of its proscribed
programs and weapons systems.”
I thought at the time that this gave Clinton a causus belli, but he (Ritter) was ignored.
So why his later pro Saddam tack?
Sour grapes?
Here is the correct Guardian link. Blix’s bleat is worth reading in order to understand how difficult cleansing the Augean stables at Turtle Bay would be. Possible, perhaps, if both the Hudson and the East rivers could be diverted but Hercules has not been available for some time.
He does make an interesting suggestion concerning the makeup of the SC at the end of his screed. If followed, the US would not have worry about whether to veto a particular idiocy because we wouldn’t have a seat or a vote. Dear Hans prefers a world mobocracy to the current situation. I suppose he feels a need for a larger cesspool. Understandable, given his output.
Otter, if we had listened to Blix — whom you describe as being in the right — Saddam would still be skimming money from OFF and handing it to suicide bombers, bin Laden, and UN officials. There would still be a political prison for children in Iraq, and the mass graves would be getting bigger. Uday and Qusay would still be raping and killing, and one of them would likely be setting up to take control of Iraq.
If bringing an end to all that means being “wrong”, I’ll gladly be wrong.
Roger:
Blix was a failure at his job and only has one hope for continued employment and imagined world influence. He will continue to be a factor in the op-ed pages and the panel discusions of the MSM and left wing intellectual think tanks. Just as Gorby was rejected by his country and nows earns his living by burnishing and reworking his reputation among the only suckers who will listen to this failure, the left in America, Blix will live on in the mind of the NY-LA Times and assorted left wing media organizations. Just picture Blix as a political Joe Louis who becomes a glorified Wal Mart door greeter at casino store fronts. “Hi, I am Hans Blix, I used to be somebody, can you lend me a buck?”
Well, good ole Hans gives us pletny of information just in what Roger posts. He acknowledges that he doesn’t have all the facts about the Oil for Food scandal and then goes on to indict US behavior anyway. Interesting. I wonder if he used the same techniques for weapons inspections.
Regarding whether Hans was right, perhaps reading the Kay and Deulfer reports will cloud that question instead of answering it in the affirmative. Right about what? Finding Saddam clean meant ending the snactions which meant enabling his weapons’ programs to run at full tilt (his intention–BTW that’s part of what he hoped to produce through the bribes). If the sanctions had ended in late 2003, Saddam would have plenty of biological weapns right about now (and there’d be not one thing we could have done about it).
If bringing an end to all that means being “wrong”, I’ll gladly be wrong.
Robert, one can certainly make a case that Bush made the right decision based on the uncertainty about WMD and the other factions you mention. (I’m not 100% sure I agree with it, but so be it.) But making that case doesn’t require pretending that Blix was a bumbling Inspector Clouseau (see Kevin P’s comment) and, if anything, is weakened by doing so.
Otter:
Blix was wrong just like everybody else. He assumed there was a WMD program waiting to be found because every major intelligence service believed he had a program. All he was arguing for was more inspections to find the WMD program. I recommend you read the Duefler Report [I have a copy on my desk] so you can finally understand that the answer to the question is not a simple yes/no. The MSM spun it as binary answer to aide the Kerry campaign. No was the answer they wanted and I donít think they bothered to read the report.
What I wonder is, when we start pressuring Syria, what country will all those phantom trucks convoy to?
The U.N. has become the cloak of darkness for too much evil. Abolish it.
Blix writes, “. . . the security council had the choice of voting with the US for armed action – or being irrelevant.”
Wrong. The choice was between enforcing its prior resolutions — however it chose to do so — and irrelevance.
The fact that three of the UNSC’s members were being bribed to avoid enforcing those very resolutions, were colluding with the former regime to circumvent sanctions they’d voted for, and were colluding with the UN to loot Iraq seems to have escaped his analysis.
But given the incompetence, corruption and tyranny abetment of his colleagues at the UN, it would be a toss up as to whether Blix is being careless, dishonest, or both.
Up until now, the largest figure I’d heard for a bribe was during the ‘Tangentopoli’ (City of Bribes) scandal in Italy during the 80′s. That sum was $250 million, so I guess the answer to your question is ‘about a hundred’. The Oil for Food scam runs to about a thousand bucks for every man, woman and child in Iraq. It’s a sum of momey that is almost unfathomable (if you cashed it into $100 bills and stacked them on forklift pallets, you’d have a 230 ton stack of money 20 feet wide by 15 feet high by 50 feet long).
The smearing of Hans Blix Lawyer and career international civil servant http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/2268819.stm is a disgrace, after all he only made one tiny little mistake when he was head of the IAEA.
So what if Saddam Hussein did have a nuclear weapons program,so what if was a psychopatic meglomaniac with a bloodstained history stretching back into childhood? He only wanted to annihilate Israel.
So what if Hans Blix,the only good apple in a barrel load of rotten fruit,gave Saddam Hussein a pass on his nuclear program,civil servants make mistakes.It is only fair to take his word for it the second time that there were no WMD in Iraq after all he did work for the UN.
As the man said,”Do you feel lucky”
Otter:
It seems to me that there are a lot of revisonists out there and Blix is among them.
You say he was right. Blix himslef said that the British dossier was correct. He said if anything it underestimated Iraq’s weapons ability.
If Blix had done his job a decade or so ago we might not be having this discussion today. There might not have been a dozen mandatory resolutions or sanctions or a food for oil scandal.
It took years for things to get to the point they are today and people like Blix played a large part in that. They can blame it all on Bush if they like, but that is not really the reality.
Where do you bank? Great question.
Why do people insist on saying that Blix was right? It must be hard to watch your country do what you think is wrong and be unable to change it (losing elections and all).
No hard WMD discoveries donít mean that we shouldnít have gone into Iraq, in my opinion. We had to give the entire Islamic world the message that regimes will fall if they harbor and arm the terrorists. Iraq was just the Islamic country that was stupid enough to be shooting at our planes after 9/11. Boom, no more Saddam regime.
It was the right thing to do, despite Blixís being ìright.î He was factually ìrightî, but substantively wrong. Saddam, and all of the M.E. countries were and are a threat to Western Civilization. Victory in Iraq is necessary to make sure the rest of them get the message.
This thread’s title reminds me of the Politically Incorrect Headline of the Century (which, fortunately, was not used). There was a fracas at an African-American (then: “black” [1970's]) frat house that required some police involvement. As a J-student, I was involved in the student newspaper’s layout and headlines. It was suggested that I go with:
Pigs Nix Nigs’ ‘Jinx.
Those were, uh, different times, of course.
The Guardian story was an excerpt from a three day lecture Blix gave at Cambridge. They are worth reading, if only to understand why the UN cannot be repaired.