The Sydney (ap)Peace(ment) Prize

In 1991, Sadaam’s nuclear program was discovered. Not by Blix mind you but after an Iraqi defector told authorities about it. Blix was stunned, or so he pretended. "The system was not designed to pick this up", he told the Washington Post. One can but wonder what the system was indeed designed to pick up.

Crucial discoveries were then made in mid and late 1991 when David Kay, one of Blix’s subordinates, initiated raids into suspected buildings without telling the Iraqis in advance. Blix disliked this method. But Dr Kay persisted, supported by Rolf Ekeus, the Director of UNSCOM and Richard Butler’s immediate predecessor (you remember Mr Butler - the former Governor of Tasmania).

Following the 1991 Gulf War, Dr Kay found a large number of documents and weapons proving that Iraq possessed significant quantities of chemical and biological weapons. It later became clear that, on the eve of the Gulf War breaking out, Saddam had been anywhere from 6-18 months away from his first A-bomb device. This was not welcome news to Hans.

Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control stated that "[Blix] has a history of not being terribly aggressive ... The Iraqis were given stars for good behaviour, when in fact they were making bombs in the rooms next door to the ones the inspectors were going into".

Paul Leventhal and Steven Dolley of the Nuclear Control Institute, wrote that while the best arms inspectors are "confrontational, refusing to accept Iraqi obfuscations and demanding evidence of destroyed weapons … (the) IAEA was more accommodating, giving Iraqi nuclear officials the benefit of the doubt when they failed to provide evidence that all nuclear weapons components had been destroyed".

Then in 1999, the United Nations established the Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) to replace UNSCOM, and Blix was appointed Executive Chairman. He served from March 1, 2000 to June 30, 2003.

Per Ahlmark, Sweden's former deputy prime minister, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, "Despite [Hans Blix's] obvious shortcomings as IAEA chief before the Gulf War, after the war he was asked to head the UN inspections team. And, like the previous period before 1991, Iraqi officials again assured the UN that they were hiding no weapons of mass destruction. Dr Blix again believed them".

UNMOVIC did the last inspections in Iraq on March 17, 2003, and inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq the next day. In his quarterly report dated June 5, 2003 covering the period March 1 to May 31 of that year, Dr Blix stated that:

UNMOVIC had not found evidence of the continuation or resumption of programmes of weapons of mass destruction …[but] … this does not necessarily mean that such items could not exist. They might.

Four months later, on Friday, October 3, ex-President Saddam Hussein and Dr Blix awoke to what they would have considered "good news". The world’s leading leftist media groups trumpeted that David Kay, now headof the Iraq Survey Group, had turned up diddly squat in his search for Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction. Witness the headlines: