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.

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:

New York Times: "No Illicit Arms Found in Iraq, US Inspector Tells Congress"

Washington Post: "Search in Iraq Finds No Banned Weapons"

BBC: "US team finds no Iraq WMD"

Most commentary ignored that Dr Kay's report validated the very reason for interfering in Iraq’s internal affairs: the regime was ignoring its UN obligations. Dr Kay justified the Coalition effort to oust Saddam by chronicling a litany of Iraqi violations and demonstrated that Saddam never had any intention of complying with the UN demands.

Early in October 2003, Dr Kay testified to a United States Congressional Committee on the activities of the Iraq Survey Group’s investigation into Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) programs. Dr Kay noted that while Saddam was required to verifiably disarm, the tyrant chose to deceive and was committed to rebuild his WMD capacity.

In March 2003, on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Dr David Kelly, the respected British arms inspector, wrote that "the long-term threat, however, remains Iraq's development to military maturity of weapons of mass destruction - something that only regime change will avert". Dr David Kay’s testimony demonstrated that Dr Kelly was right.

It was such warnings that stirred George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard to action.

But six months later things changed. Dr Blix’s behaviour became somewhat erratic.

On 18 February, 2004, a month before the anniversary of the liberation of Iraq, Dr Blix popped up on the international scene enthusiastically spruiking his book, Disarming Iraq, and comprehensively castigated the British and American governments over Iraq's WMDs. He crowed that they had exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam.

But barely a year earlier, Dr Blix’s own statements justified the war to liberate Iraq. So was Blix lying to the international community in 2004 or did he lie in 2003? On February 26 this year, Dr Blix claimed that the West’s neo-colonial" approach in dealing with Iran is "humiliating and unfruitful" and Tehran should be given reasonable incentives to halt its nuclear program.

When pressed he elaborated: "One feature, which is now key and peculiarly not very much debated ... is the demand - first of the Europeans and then of the US … - that first Iran must suspend enrichment. This is, in a way, like telling a child, 'now first you behave and thereafter you'll be given your rewards'. And this I think is humiliating." Blix warned that the West's "insolence" would only lead to more intransigence.

Pity that history is replete with evidence that appeasement does not work and that the outstretched arm of courageous democratic nations is the only thing that ensures peace and allows prosperity to flourish. Just scan Winston Churchill's and Harry S Truman’s resumes if you don’t believe me. Or better yet, listen to General George S Patton define why we must not yield in the War on Terror, by railing against the appeasement that was rife in Europe and regrettably has not been totally eradicated.

The sad facts are that Dr Blix failed in his duties in Iraq and the Peace Prize menagerie has failed in its selection process.

When all is said and done it’s clear that Dr Blix has not learned a damn thing in the last 20 years. To this day he has not come to grips with just how deep is the well of Islamic hate. The most generous that can be said of Dr Blix is that as a weapons inspector, he proved to be the wrong man for the wrong job.

And as for the poor judgment exhibited by the Sydney Peace Prize judges, the less said the better.