A man of the world

MADRID -- On the morning of March 11, Hans Blix hailed a taxi. After receiving a peace prize in Barcelona, he was in Madrid heading for the airport to attend meetings in Berlin and then on to New York the next morning to launch his new book.

It was 7:30 a.m. as his taxi skirted Atocha train station in downtown Madrid. Ten minutes later a wave of bombs ripped through four packed commuter trains heading for the station platforms. Blix didn't learn about the carnage he had narrowly missed until he arrived in Berlin.

In his hotel room, the United Nations' former chief weapons inspector in Iraq watched the horrific images on CNN as the casualty count in Madrid climbed, reaching 191 dead and more than 1,500 injured. He also returned phone calls, including one to this reporter, who was trying to catch up with him for an interview in person. I was at a makeshift morgue set up in

a convention center on a bleak, industrial fringe of Madrid. Straining to hear Blix on my cellphone over a desperate clamor of families, I explained to Blix where I was. Blix sighed. "What a world we live in," he said.

His words were a reflexive, almost cliched expression of despair in this post-9/11 world. But the observation takes a sharper meaning coming from a man at the center of the political maelstrom over the US-led invasion of Iraq, an official trading at the highest levels of intelligence who harbors fear that the Iraq war will unleash more terrorism. The Madrid bombings, he believes, turned out to be grim confirmation of that.

Blix, who at age 75 still works at a staggering pace, found time in his demanding schedule for three phone conversations with this reporter last month, during which he wove together his thoughts on the events leading up to the war in Iraq, the state of the world in the war's aftermath, and his role in it. He is a warm and decent

man who not only returns phone calls but seems to always have enough time to make a point clearly and, when engaged by conversation, to keep talking well into the night. His message is the same one that he unfurled over and over during a recent publicity tour in America to pitch his new book, "Disarming Iraq": that Washington and London dangerously manipulated intelligence on the threat level posed by weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and spun together a set of ill-considered facts to make a case that invading Iraq was part of the "war on terror." In so doing, Blix argues, the US and British governments actually undercut the international struggle against terrorism and the international coalition needed to effectively fight it, undermined the authority of the UN Security Council, and seriously damaged the credibility of the United States and Britain.

The war, he argues, "has not abated terrorism, but in some ways exacerbated the problem. . . . Iraq was supposed to be a show of force, and, yes, that has to be done to fight terrorism. But one has to understand the political background, the root causes."

Just as the war in Iraq divided the world, the Madrid bombings seemed to drive home the point that the war on terror -- or at least the sense of how best to go about fighting it -- may also set Europe and America apart. Blix embodies the internationalist spirit of Europe, which stands in stark contrast to the unilateralist philosophy shaped by the Bush White House. In Europe, the Madrid bombings evoked a discussion of the "root causes" of terrorism. In Washington, such talk smacks of appeasement. If America is from Mars, Europe from Venus, to use one of the most oft-quoted phrases in Europe these days, then Blix is a true Venutian.

A Swedish lawyer and international public servant, Blix served as director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency for 16 years until he retired in 1997.

He was in Antarctica in January 2000 on a business trip with his wife, Eva Kettis, who is an official in the Swedish Foreign Ministry responsible for the Arctic region, when he got the call from UN secretary-general Kofi Annan asking him to head the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which was established by the UN Security Council in 1999 to resume weapons inspections in Iraq.

Blix was comfortable in retirement. Surgery on his spine had enabled him to once again live out his passion for hiking. He was enjoying time with his sons, Goran, 32, who is married and a professor of French and Italian at Princeton University, and Marten, 35, who is single and an economist for the Swedish government in Stockholm. Blix pictured spending much more time with his wife of 42 years at their cottage -- a converted barn -- on an island off Sweden's northeast coast. He says he dreams of the quiet of that place. But then he accepted the job that would put him at the center of a deeply divisive debate over the war in Iraq -- or "Out of the Ice-Box and Into the Frying Pan," as one of his chapter titles suggests.

Asked if he planned to ease back into retirement now, Blix replied, "No. . . . I have no intention to slow down and play golf. I feel like I have a lot to contribute right now. When your health is good, you can do it."

Not wasting any time, Blix has already been named to head up the Stockholm-based Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. Funded by the Swedish government, the commission brings together weapons experts from all over the world who will deliver recommendations next year on how best to contain WMD worldwide.

Every conversation with Blix wanders back to his certainty that international law is the only way to address the ominous proliferation of WMD. This passion started early. As a young law student at Columbia University in the early 1950s, Blix was already focused on international law. It was the height of the Cold War, and Blix was being confirmed in the faith that the then-nascent United Nations would be the central arbiter to prevent nuclear conflict or the proxy wars that flared between the superpowers. At that time, he served as a researcher for Columbia professor and former US ambassador-at-large Philip Caryl Jessup, whose 1948 "A Modern Law of Nations" remains a definitive book on international law.

All these years later, everything about Blix -- his contained smile, the choice of traditionally tailored suits with silk ties, just about every word he carefully selects from his legal background, even the shape of his eyeglasses -- speaks to his love of, and abiding faith in, this genteel (some might argue anachronistic) world of diplomacy bound by international law.

His book is a reflective and reasoned discussion of the events that led to war. The narrative is cautious but at many turns compelling, particularly in depicting the intrigue behind the scenes as the sands of a diplomatic hourglass sifted down, inextricably leading to the start of the invasion.

During this time, the White House took many opportunities to vilify Blix and his team, with many members of the Bush administration showing open disdain for his approach to international law. Washington feared that Blix -- if his investigators found no WMD -- could sink the Bush administration's plan to topple the regime in Baghdad.

Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control and a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin law school, was a longtime opponent of Blix who weighed in on the attack. He had written a scathing 1993 article on the International Atomic Energy Agency and Blix for The New Yorker in which he maintained that they were being duped by the Iraqis. As he said in interviews in the runup to the war, he feared the same was true in the fall of 2002 and spring of 2003.

"He was forced to always take a very deferential attitude toward the countries he was inspecting," Milhollin said in a recent interview.

Joseph Cirincione, director for non-proliferation at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who has written an extensive report on the failure to find WMD in Iraq, said he admires Blix for his "calm, measured tones" despite the "orchestrated campaign" for years in Washington to discredit him. "In order to justify the war, they had to prove that the inspections were failures" he said.

But even Blix is sufficiently self-effacing to concede he was caught in a paradox in the 2003 inspections. The fact was that Saddam Hussein's government had allowed the inspectors back in only because the US forces were amassing. And by the time the UN weapons inspectors could get their work started in earnest, it would be the start of the hot season in the Iraqi desert, which would have defied Washington's timetable for an invasion.

There were despairing moments when Blix wondered if his work was not simply a way for the United States to buy time until its military buildup was complete. That, Blix believes, is effectively what happened on March 16, 2003, when Washington notified him to remove his inspectors.

Blix's book lands amid the political fallout from several other Washington-insider books, notably "Against All Enemies," by former US counterterrorism chief Richard A. Clarke, and "The Price of Loyalty," written by journalist Ron Suskind with extensive help from former Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, both of which paint the Bush administration as so obsessed with invading Iraq that it no longer critically evaluated available intelligence.

Blix's book also comes on the heels of powerful statements to Congress by David Kay, appointed by Washington to head up the search for WMD in Iraq. Upon returning from Iraq without finding any evidence of WMD, Kay made the dramatic comment to Congress: "We were almost all wrong."

But what sets Blix apart from Clarke, O'Neill, and Kay is that his book documents the very case that he made public to the world before the war, not after. Blix's was a lonely voice in the run-up to war as he called for a reasonable assessment of intelligence suggesting that the WMD stockpiles may have already been destroyed, albeit in an unverifiable manner. That his account of this time in history is so soft-spoken -- and explicitly avoids saying "I told you so," -- says a lot about who he is.

As Cirincione puts it, "Blix doesn't have to say [`I told you so']. It's obvious. It's obvious to every nonpartisan observer that in this critical operation, Blix was right and Bush was dead wrong."

Blix said, "The problem is not that we got the intelligence wrong, it is that the US and British governments chose the intelligence they wanted to build their case for war."

He maintains that destroying Hussein's brutal regime was "a welcome result of the war," but quickly adds that it was also not "the avowed aim nor the justification given for it." He never suggests that President Bush and British prime minister Tony Blair were lying or acting in bad faith. He reasons that they were swept away by their own beliefs, like the Puritans who presided over "the witch trials," as Blix puts it.

Referring to Bush and Blair, he says, "They were convinced that there were witches, and so any broom they saw in the corner was evidence of it."

As part of the publicity tour, Blix spoke at several large colleges, including New York University and the University of California. He said he was surprised, and humbled, by the large audiences. "I am not what you would call rousing. . . . The people there wanted to hear from the non-spinners. They felt it was spin that was used to justify this war, and they wanted to hear the facts for themselves."

As Blix returned home from America last week, the world's attention shifted from Madrid back to Iraq, where four American civilian contractors were slaughtered and dragged through streets and five US marines were killed in roadside bombings in the span of a few hours. "I am worried about America," Blix said, reflecting on his visit. "I hope there will be a reaction, a turn of the tide . . . or at least a realization that the intervention in Iraq has not been a knockdown for terrorism, but in some ways it has had the effect of spreading it."

"There are a lot of lessons to be learned for all of us," he added, "and they are important lessons with the world the way it is right now."