[A-List] US imperialism: Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

As arms inspectors arrive, row erupts over US smears

Team leader says attacks by hawks 'unhelpful'

Helena Smith in Larnaca and Ewen MacAskill
Tuesday November 19, 2002
The Guardian

The United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, yesterday accused
hawks in Washington, who are bent on going to war with Iraq, of conducting a
smear campaign against him.

The extent of the tension between Mr Blix and elements of the US
administration burst into the open on the day that he led UN weapons
inspectors back to Baghdad for the first time in four years to renew their
search for chemical, biological and nuclear-related weapons.

Key figures in the Bush administration have criticised Mr Blix in recent
weeks, claiming he is too weak to stand up to the Iraqi president, Saddam
Hussein, and that he may fail to find the weapons that the CIA claims have
been hidden by the Iraqis.

In an interview with the Guardian in Cyprus, the last staging post before
his flight to Baghdad, Mr Blix rounded on his critics. Asked whether he
thought US hawks were behind the smear campaign, Mr Blix said: "You can say
there's some truth in that judgment."

Mr Blix and the head of the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA),
Mohammed el-Baradei, who will join the inspections, later arrived in Baghdad
aboard a cargo plane with the black letters of the UN painted on its side.
Amid chaotic scenes at the airport, Iraqi and Arab journalists pressed the
inspectors on whether they expected friction with the US. The inspectors
insisted they did not expect it.

Mr Blix's report, which will be presented to the UN security council early
next year, could be the deciding factor in whether or not there is war in
Iraq. The US whispering campaign against Mr Blix, a former Swedish diplomat,
may be designed to undercut any report that is favourable to Iraq.

The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defence secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, have both said they do not believe the inspectors will succeed in
disarming president Saddam, and their aides have anonomously briefed against
Mr Blix who failed to detect Iraq's nuclear programme in the 1980s when he
was head of the IAEA.

Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser and an associate of Mr Rumsfeld, said in
London last week: "If it were up to me, on the strength of his previous
record, I wouldn't have chosen Hans Blix."

In his first response, Mr Blix said yesterday: "I haven't seen the criticism
myself but I have heard about it. I don't see the point of criticising
inspections that have not taken place... it's not very meaningful."

He described the accusations that he was not up to job as "not very
meaningful, and certainly unhelpful."

One of his team also dismissed the criticism, rejecting the allegation that
Mr Blix had failed to find evidence of the nuclear programme."That's
absolutely wrong. Back then inspectors were only allowed to visit sites that
were declared," the inspector said. He added that the powers now available
to the inspectors, such as the ability to visit sites without prior notice,
did not apply before the 1991 Gulf war.

Washington's alarm over Mr Blix intensified after a recent speech in which
he said he favoured cooperation with the Iraqis rather than confrontation.
His colleagues said Mr Blix was acutely aware of the animosity aroused by
the last team of inspectors who were accused by Iraq of abrasive behaviour
and of spying for the US.

The inspectors, who sought and destroyed Iraqi biological, chemical and
nuclear-related weapons after the Gulf war, abandoned Baghdad in December
1998, claiming Iraqis were obstructing their work.

Mr Blix, 72, who came back from retirement to take over the job, has done
much to change the culture of how inspectors work.

The 26-strong UN team was formally welcomed at the airport by General Hosam
Amin, head of the Iraqi monitoring directorate, a group of scientists,
engineers and military personnel.

Mr Blix and Mr el-Baradei held talks with Gen Amin and his officials last
night. Mr Blix and Mr el-Baradei are due to leave Iraq tomorrow after talks
with Iraqi officials.

The advance team that arrived with them will prepare the office,
accommodation and communications for the arrival of the inspectors next
week. Mr Blix said preliminary inspections could resume next Wednesday, with
full-scale checks starting after Iraq files a declaration of banned weapons
programmes, if any, by December 8.

The arrival of the UN team coincided with air attacks on Iraqi defensive
positions. The Iraqis fired back, a move the US insists contravenes the UN
resolution passed this month.

-----

Blix bears brunt of hawks'frustration

Right finds new target after losing argument to fight swift war on Iraq

Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday November 19, 2002
The Guardian

The claims by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, that he has been the
target of a smear campaign by Pentagon hawks is the culmination of months of
tension at the heart of the Bush administration about the UN inspection
team.

Earlier this year the deputy secretary for defence, Paul Wolfowitz, ordered
a CIA report on why Mr Blix, as chief of the International Atomic Energy
Agency during the 1980s and 1990s, failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity.
Mr Blix has much more sweeping powers now, but that fact has failed to
banish the suspicions of a cluster of hardliners in the administration that
includes Mr Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the under-secretary for defence, and
John Bolton, the deputy secretary of state.

"There are a whole group of people in this administration who are against
multilateral institutions, and also the people that staff them," said Joseph
Cirincione, the director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace. "Hans Blix to some of these people is the
embodiment of everything that is wrong with the multilateral approach."

The resurrection of UN arms inspections for Iraq is seen as a defeat for the
hawkish sections of the administration - both for relatively straightforward
nationalists such as the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defence
secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as well as for the faction led by Mr Wolfowitz,
who have been described by scholars as "democratic imperialists".

Mr Wolfowitz, influenced by Richard Perle, chairman of the defence policy
board, is believed to view US military action in Iraq as the first step in a
larger project of realignment and democratisation of the Middle East.

For months, the hardliners pressed home the case for a military strike
against Iraq, ratcheting up their arguments to such an extent that
intelligence officials complained of intense pressure to cook up information
that would support a war.

In August, Mr Cheney said Iraq would have nuclear weapons "fairly soon" - in
direct contradiction of CIA reports that it would take at least five more
years.

Mr Rumsfeld, meanwhile, accused Saddam Hussein of providing sanctuary to
al-Qaida operatives fleeing Afghanistan - although they had actually
travelled to Iraqi Kurdistan, which is outside his control.

Until the summer, the hardliners were firmly in the ascendancy. But all
their efforts were undone by George Bush's decision to take America's case
against Iraq to the UN. "There is no question that a battle was won on
September 12 when President Bush went to the UN, and instead of condemning
it, praised it and embraced it and promised that the US would work through
its administration to disarm Iraq and to resort to military force only as a
last resort. That is not the strategy some in the Pentagon had been
agitating for for months," said Mr Cirincione.

Powell's campaign

Mr Bush's decision to work through the UN was a product of a dogged campaign
by Mr Powell, detailed at great length in a series of reports in the
Washington Post which paint a picture of a highly changeable administration
prone to shifts in policy direction on an almost weekly basis.

However, Mr Powell had been disturbed for some time at his dwindling
influence in the administration - particularly on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict - a weakness he sought to remedy by requesting a series of personal
chats with Mr Bush.

The conversations, which began in August, appeared to have paid off as Mr
Powell swayed Mr Bush towards his arguments to work with the UN. Even so, it
was not seen as a secure victory.

The hardliners continued to believe they could woo the president back to
their way of thinking, and the Washington Post reported blistering rows
between Mr Cheney, described as "hell-bent for action" against Iraq, and Mr
Powell on the wording of the speech. In the end, Mr Powell triumphed. The
rhetoric of the speech was scaled down, and he threw himself into the behind
the scenes diplomacy that resulted in a unanimous security council
resolution on November 8 for sending weapons inspectors to Iraq.

But, as Mr Blix noted yesterday, it is virtually certain that the hawks
remain determined to return to the ascendancy. "This may be a very low
moment for them, but I think they believe in the long run they will have
their chance," said Ellen Laitson, president of the Henry Stimson Centre, a
Washington-based thinktank.

"I think they have done a lot to set up very high expectations, and a very
high standard, and they are already preparing for the inspections not to
work. If you look at the deployment in the region, and how the bureaucracy
is gearing up, they are putting a lot in motion militarily even though there
may be this temporary lull of the inspections."

Some commentators have predicted the hawks will try to set a trigger date
for December 8 - when Iraq is supposed to provide a declaration of its
arsenal. Amid expectations of a patently false declaration, the hawks will
try hard to get their early war despite Mr Blix.