Blix Not Bombs

Before he left New York, Hans Blix had a poster on his apartment wall from the big antiwar demonstration in New York City a year ago on the eve of the attack on Iraq. "Blix Not Bombs," it proclaims. Blix, the former head of UNMOVIC, the United Nations arms-inspection team in Iraq, is an unlikely poster-person. Avuncular, quiet-spoken but with a sharp and wry sense of humor, the Swedish diplomat has had an eclectic set of enemies. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz set the CIA to investigate him and reportedly "hit the ceiling" when--not for the first time, it now appears--the agency came back with the "wrong" intelligence. On the other hand, before the endgame began, the Iraqis denounced him as a "spy" and some antiwar protesters castigated him and his inspectors as the tools of American warmongers.

That means he probably got it about right, and even now, in his just-published book, Disarming Iraq, he has not gone out of his way to make friends. The failure to discover WMDs in Iraq, he told The Nation in an interview, proves that export controls and rigorous inspection backed by military pressure had already disarmed Iraq before the war.

Coming from the long Swedish tradition of support for the UN, he laconically repudiates the idea prevalent in pro-Administration circles that the organization in any way "failed" when it refused to back the invasion. "It is an interesting notion that when a small minority has been rebuffed by a strong majority, it is the majority that has failed the test," he says.

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