November 20, 2002	Wednesday	Ramazan 14, 1423

WASHINGTON: The claims by Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, that he has been the target of a smear campaign by Pentagon hawks is the culmination of months of tension at the heart of the Bush administration about the UN inspection team.

Earlier this year the deputy secretary for defence, Paul Wolfowitz, ordered a CIA report on why Blix, as chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency during the 1980s and 1990s, failed to detect Iraqi nuclear activity. Blix has much more sweeping powers now, but that fact has failed to banish the suspicions of a cluster of hardliners in the administration that includes Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, the under-secretary for defence, and John Bolton, the deputy secretary of state.

“There are a whole group of people in this administration who are against multilateral institutions, and also the people that staff them,” said Joseph Cirincione, the director of the non-proliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Hans Blix to some of these people is the embodiment of everything that is wrong with the multilateral approach.”

The resurrection of UN arms inspections for Iraq is seen as a defeat for the hawkish sections of the administration — both for relatively straightforward nationalists such as the vice-president, Dick Cheney, and the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, as well as for the faction led by Wolfowitz, who have been described by scholars as “democratic imperialists”.

Wolfowitz, influenced by Richard Perle, chairman of the defence policy board, is believed to view US military action in Iraq as the first step in a larger project of realignment and democratisation of the Middle East.

For months, the hardliners pressed home the case for a military strike against Iraq, ratcheting up their arguments to such an extent that intelligence officials complained of intense pressure to cook up information that would support a war.

In August, Cheney said Iraq would have nuclear weapons “fairly soon” — in direct contradiction of CIA reports that it would take at least five more years.

Until the summer, the hardliners were firmly in the ascendancy. But all their efforts were undone by George Bush’s decision to take America’s case against Iraq to the UN.

Bush’s decision to work through the UN was a product of a dogged campaign by Powell.

But, as Blix noted on Monday, it is virtually certain that the hawks remain determined to return to the ascendancy.

Some commentators have predicted the hawks will try to set a trigger date for Dec 8 — when Iraq is supposed to provide a declaration of its arsenal. Amid expectations of a patently false declaration, the hawks will try hard to get their early war despite Blix.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.