The Sydney (ap)Peace(ment) Prize

Just when you thought Hans Blix had disappeared into some igloo in Sweden’s far frigid north, not to be heard from again, he arrives in Sydney and reminds us of the annual garish carnival celebrating all things that Christians find objectionable: rabid anti-Americanism, palpable anti-Semitism and a naïve belief in the magic of the mother of all supranational monsters, the United Nations.

The citation for his award, the Sydney Peace Prize, reads:

Hans Blix, for principled and courageous opposition to proponents of war in Iraq, for life long advocacy of humanitarian law and non violence, and for leadership of disarmament programs to rid the world of weapons of terror.

They could have summarised Dr Blix as simply carrying Neville Chamberlain's torch, and saved on the typing.

The chap they honoured is the same Hans Blix who was integral to the United Nations' machine of corruption and ineptness for coddling and excusing Saddam Hussein for 12 long years. That’s right, 12 long winded years.

The part time bureaucrat and full time appeaser received the prize on November 7. It was dished out by former Prime Minister Paul Keating: enough said. No doubt Blix’s speech, steeped as it was with anti Americanisms, helped him over the line. In his lecture he equated nations that have nuclear arsenals and are democratic, for example, the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel and France, with despotic regimes (mostly Islamic, but with a couple of Asian exceptions).

That’s right. In Dr Blix’s eyes, the United Kingdom has no more right to hold nukes than, say China or North Korea.

Even so, it seems that nukes are not what keeps Dr Blix up at night. Global warming apparently does: according to him, that is the real danger to mankind and not global conflict. In 2003, Dr Blix said: "world conflicts I do not believe will happen any longer. But the environment, that is a creeping danger. I'm more worried about global warming than I am of any major military conflict". I’d like to see him tell that to the denizens of the Arabian Gulf states who, between prayers, are quaking in their expensive sandals, fearing an Iranian nuke flying their way.

To get a sense of where Dr Blix is coming from, let’s first take a short walk back in history.

Prior to his role in leading the UN’s weapons inspectors, Dr Blix was the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the group charged with monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, from 1981-97. That job unmasked his astonishing naïveté, if not his demonstrable incompetence. According to National Review White House correspondent Byron York: "On Aug. 6, 1991, the Washington Post ran a story headlined 'Baghdad Surreptitiously Extracted Plutonium: International Monitoring Apparently Failed'." The story, and subsequent reports, exposed that Saddam had cobbled together a massive and sophisticated nuclear-weapons program under the snout and between the trotters of Hans Blix. In the years leading up to 1991, Blix gave Saddam high distinctions for abiding by the treaty.