Hans Blix is a big tease. Hyped by political websites and excerpted in the Guardian (U.K.), Blix's new book, Disarming Iraq (Pantheon), promised to deliver the real story behind the run-up to the war in Iraq. But ever the even-handed diplomat, Blix writes like a man afraid to offend, and in doing fails to deliver much in the way of new information about last year's standoff between Washington and Baghdad.
As head of the United Nations' weapons inspection unit from 2000-2003, Blix had unparalleled access to newsmakers on all sides of the conflict. He met regularly with President Bush's top lieutenants; he shuttled often between New York, London, and Iraq, attempting to garner information from Saddam Hussein's government while trying to persuade the Bush White House that weapons inspectors needed a little more time. He was privy to reams of documents and evidence that were never made public.
But the authoritative, daring, take-no-prisoners book that might've been is subsumed by Blix's desire to stay far above the fray. The result is a cold, colorless, and overly equivocal volume that confirms what most readers already knew: Baghdad's stonewalling emboldened an Administration that was itching for a fight.
Here, for example, is what passes for insight into the Bush team's worldview: "My speculation and it is no more than that is that the Bush administration decided in the summer of 2002 that, following the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, it should be ready preemptively to strike any identified enemy which it feared might pose a threat to the U.S."
It's telling that Blix would feel the need to preface his position with the caveat that it is only "speculation." By now, almost everyone would agree with Blix's statement the president himself has put the world on notice that he will launch additional preemptive attacks if he believed, as he apparently did with Afghanistan and Iraq, that America was endangered by so-called "rogue states" but the author appears so deeply afraid of upsetting anyone that he comes off as a wishy-washy wimp.
Indeed, it is the sort of book written with a mind toward making sure that nobody's feelings get hurt. The closest Blix comes to criticizing Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair is his lukewarm suggestion that the two men should've reined in hawkish government officials who exaggerated evidence of Saddam's weapons capabilities. Writes Blix, "[I]t would not have taken much critical thinking on their own part or on the part of their close advisers to prevent statements that misled the public." Elsewhere, Blix effectively lets Blair and Bush off the hook; it was a war, Blix writes, that was fueled by faulty intelligence.
Blix is perhaps hesitant to scold because, like Bush and Blair, he himself believed that Saddam "still concealed weapons of mass destruction." Blix says he wanted inspectors to have more time to find proof that such weapons existed, because, as he recalls telling Blair, "It would prove paradoxical and absurd if 250,000 troops were to invade Iraq and find very little." (So desperate was he to avoid war between the U.S. and Iraq, Blix writes that he "sketched points that I thought could be included in a televised address by Saddam" in the hope that his text would be delivered to the Iraqi dictator. It wasn't.)
While applauding the removal of Saddam, Blix, in the book's most persuaive passage, argues that "a greater price was paid for this action: in the compromised legitimacy of action, in the damaged credibility of the governments pursuing it, and in the diminished authority of the United Nations."
Blix's writing is serviceable, but he has what one might call "issues" when it comes to punctuation. Visiting Paris, he writes, "I noticed in one hall a short, temporary pillar which on one side advertised Coca-Cola!" Later, at a meeting with Blair, "There was afternoon tea and with it something I had not had since I was a student at Cambridge nearly fifty years before: crumpets!" Who knew a career diplomat would get so excited about soda and pastries?
The most significant problem with Disarming Iraq, though, is the audience; anyone who feels compelled to delve into Blix's account will have closely followed the war and its aftermath. It is widely accepted, for example, that the Bush Administration "would have welcomed a Security Council resolution [authorizing the use of military force in Iraq], it did not want its plans to be dependent on any decision by the United Nations." It is equally well known that, as Blix puts it, Bush and co. appeared to be "planning for war at full steam ahead, with an option for calling it off in the unlikely event that Iraq cracked."
For a book that passes itself off as an insider account, Disarming Iraq relies heavily on conventional wisdom. A little unconventional thinking might've better served both Blix and the reader.
Kevin Canfield is a journalist in New York.
