The group discussion stuttered on but proved inconclusive. Frustrated, Powell and Rice took Blix and me aside to an antechamber. “You should not feel the burden of the implications of your inspection reports,” Powell told us, “because any decision to use force will be made by heads of state, and not by you.” Powell may have meant to be reassuring, but in the context it came across as patronizing.
In the end, we managed to dissuade them from some of the more belligerent proposals. But they were insistent on one measure: the need to interview Iraqi scientists outside of Iraq, taking their families with them to avoid retribution by Saddam Hussein’s regime. We tried to spell out the problems with this clause. I tried to explain the cultural nuances of “extended family” in the Middle East. Why, I asked, were they so certain that an Iraqi scientist would want to leave his or her country and never return, in order to benefit the United States or the West? How could the United Nations ensure that scientists who agreed to leave would not be threatened or even killed before their departure? What could we do to prevent the scientists’ extended families from being harmed as a result?
Nothing we said made a difference. The Americans didn’t really listen to these human rights considerations. They were convinced that interviewing scientists outside Iraq was a great idea; they said they could not change the measure anyway, because it had been approved “at the highest level” of the U.S. government. The clause stayed in the resolution (although, in the months that followed, not once was this provision put to use).
A few weeks later, with negotiations on the resolution still under way, Blix and I were called to a short courtesy meeting at the White House. On our way to meet President Bush, we had our first encounter with Vice President Dick Cheney. It was brief; Cheney was sitting behind his desk. Cheney wasted no time on small talk; he had a direct, simple message to convey. “The U.S. is ready to work with the United Nations inspectors,” he told us, “but we are also ready to discredit the inspections in order to disarm Iraq.”
Having received this warning, we proceeded to our meeting with Bush. Other than Condoleezza Rice and Bush’s chief of staff, Blix and I were the only audience. In what was more or less a monologue, Bush got right to the point. He asserted that he was in favor of using inspections to address Iraq’s WMD issues, that he would prefer a peaceful resolution of the international concerns about Saddam Hussein’s regime. “I’m not a trigger-happy Texas cowboy, with six-guns,” he quipped, sliding forward on his armchair, hands on his hips, to show us how a cowboy would pull out his pistols. On the other hand, he countered, if peaceful approaches were unsuccessful, he would not hesitate to lead a “coalition of the willing,” using military force. It was an odd interaction: Bush kept repeating that it was an “honor” for him to meet with us, but he was not the least bit interested in anything we might have had to say. Together with our exchange with Cheney, the encounter told us clearly that the U.S. administration viewed us as bit players in an operation they intended to control.
Still, when Resolution 1441 was adopted, one week later, the United States made one last concession. The Americans had wanted the resolution to authorize the automatic use of force if Iraq were considered to be in material breach of its obligations. To many members of the Security Council, this was unacceptable. The P-5—primarily the French, Russians, and Americans—worked out a compromise. The final version merely said that if Iraq was found in material breach, the council would “look into” the next steps to be taken.
And so, after four years of the Agency’s absence, the door to Iraq inspections was reopened.
For the IAEA, the starting point for reentering Iraq was our December 1998 baseline: our existing store of knowledge of Iraq’s past nuclear capabilities and facilities. Any fuel cycle or weapons-related facilities from the early 1990s had been completely dismantled; all weapons-usable material had been removed as early as February 1994; what remained was low-grade nuclear material and certain dual-use facilities and materials—and, of course, the knowledge of certain nuclear processes: no inspection program can erase knowledge already learned. At the time of the first Gulf War, Saddam Hussein’s nuclear scientists had still been some distance away from constructing a nuclear weapon, but they had achieved laboratory-scale mastery of some uranium enrichment processes and weaponization techniques.
The task before us was to determine what had changed and what nuclear activities, if any, had been revived during the intervening four years. To arrive at an answer, we would rely on inspections of known facilities, visits to new sites, the restart of surveillance systems, extensive environmental monitoring, and an exhaustive program of interviews with Iraqi nuclear scientists and other relevant persons.
At this point, the IAEA was an experienced, mature organization staffed by long-term career inspectors whose loyalties to the Agency were clear. They were a functional group, well versed in dealing with nuclear safeguards challenges; for many, Iraq was familiar ground, in terms of both the culture and the nuclear facilities. The Iraq team included dozens of nationalities and views from across the political spectrum. Inevitably, some inspectors felt sympathetic to the country under investigation, and others hostile. I encouraged a focus on technical objectivity and legal accuracy, but I also understood that technical judgments might sometimes be clouded by preconceived biases, so we tried to ensure the thorough airing of all opinions, including dissenting views.
I relied in particular on Jacques Baute, a brilliant French physicist who headed the IAEA’s Iraq Nuclear Verification Office and whose prior experience with the French nuclear weapons program gave him strong technical judgment. An excellent administrator well liked by everybody, Jacques was the primary architect of our work plan in Iraq, and he managed the operations smoothly with the keen understanding of the need for cultural sensitivity and the respect that made our interactions effective. Also with us was Laura Rockwood, an extroverted and independent-minded senior American legal officer who had worked with me since the mid-eighties and remained thoroughly versed in the legal intricacies of the Iraq mission since the inspections of the early 1990s. In the highly charged political atmosphere in which we were working, the ability to rely on such trusted colleagues was an enormous asset.
The inspections formally began on November 13, 2002. The central feature of the new Iraq mission was urgency, based on the imminent threat of military action if Iraq failed to show maximum cooperation to enable us to prove that it had given up its alleged weapons of mass destruction. This threat, particularly as it appeared in mainstream press accounts, in actions behind the scenes, and in the rhetoric of Western officials—primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom—dominated the landscape throughout the months of inspections. There was a relentless barrage. Every Iraqi action was deemed insufficient. Every delay was reported as evidence of a lack of cooperation. Every WMD-related accusation—Iraq’s attempts to procure aluminum tubes, its alleged mobile laboratories, its purported purchase of uranium from Niger—was given sensational coverage as new proof of Saddam Hussein’s malicious intent. But when the inspections found otherwise, the news was disputed or brushed aside as unimportant.
This rhetoric inevitably tainted the atmosphere of our high-level interactions with Iraqi officials, whether the meetings took place in Baghdad, New York, or Vienna. In one of our first meetings in New York, Dr. Jaffar Dhia Jaffar, who had in the past been in charge of Iraq’s previous nuclear program, was visibly upset. Jaffar always came across as a bit arrogant and defiant of the entire verification process. But in this case he stepped over the line. He accused the IAEA of being biased—essentially, a tool of the West—in our unwillingness simply to close the nuclear file. His remarks to Jacques Baute became personal and abusive, going so far as to criticize his language skills. “Your English,” he said, “only improved when you married a British woman.”