Disarming Iraq, by Hans Blix. Pantheon, 2004, 285 pages + index.
Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America, by Scott Ritter. Context Books, 2003, 206 pages.

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Prospecting for Anthrax

by Bruce Ramsey

Here are two books, each by representatives of the United Nations who inspected Iraq for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Each now says there weren't any such weapons. Each opposed the U.S.-British invasion.

There the similarity ends. These two accounts are as different as a meatball-and-tomato-sauce grinder is from a stack of crackers.

Let us start with the crackers.

That would be "Disarming Iraq" by Hans Blix. Blix, a Swede, is a diplomat through and through, and it ruins him as an author. Consider, for example, how he describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser. A good writer would pick out a turn of phrase, a strategic pause, a mannerism — something to fix her in the mind. Blix tells us what he said. He is justifying his own work. In two pages, he tells us only two things about her: that she did "not react visibly to my description of the possible timetable" and that she "showed little understanding for our qualms" about another thing. Two negatives.

He has similar meetings with French President Chirac, with Prime Minister Blair, and others. None of them comes alive.

Blix is better on the issues of the weapons. The official reason for the war was that Iraq had failed to comply with UN resolutions that demanded that it give up its "weapons of mass destruction." The thing to focus on, says Blix, is whether Iraq had any such weapons, but as war approached, the U.S. government began to focus on whether Iraq had accounted for weapons that it had once had.

Iraq had not accounted for them. Iraq said it had destroyed the weapons in 1991, that there had been no international witnesses, no filming, and no surviving documents. That was because having to destroy these weapons was a shameful thing, and they didn't want to commemorate it.

The United States said Iraq had not accounted for its weapons, a phrasing that made the failure of accounting and the possession of weapons into the same thing.

Blix says he thought maybe the Iraqis did have weapons, but as war approached he became more irritated at the American professions of certainty. He recalls Undersecretary of State John Wolf saying that the only thing that could stop the invasion was for Iraq to "voluntarily take inspectors to the secret hide sites." In a bit of uncharacteristic color, Blix characterizes this as, "The witches exist; you are appointed to deal with these witches; testing whether there are witches is only a dilution of the witch hunt."

Blix also discusses Bush's statement that Iraq had attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger, an accusation soon discredited. Blix said he hadn't believed it anyway, because yellowcake needs to be reprocessed in order to make bomb uranium, and Iraq had no reprocessing plant. "But I never publicly voiced my doubt," he says.

The diplomat again.

Blix does voice a doubt about the idea that Iraq sent its weapons of mass destruction to Syria, or that they are hidden in Iraq and not yet discovered. First, he says, it is unlikely that Syria or any other country would accept such "a poisoned chalice." And if the stuff were in Iraq, someone would have betrayed it by now, as they betrayed Saddam Hussein and his sons.

So why did the United States invade Iraq? Blix says the American government really believed there were such weapons, and the reason they believed it was that there was "a deficit of critical thinking" at the top.

On the last page comes Blix's political conclusion: "The action taken against Iraq in 2003 did not strengthen the case for a right to preemptive action." To the diplomat Blix, this is strong stuff.

Now, the meatball grinder.

The author of "Frontier Justice" is an American, Scott Ritter. I listened to him speak in Seattle in May 2001, and I interviewed him briefly afterward. He is a former Marine and looks as American as a football player. He said he was a Republican, though he was already being denounced by Republicans and would later be tarred by The Weekly Standard as Saddam's American apologist.

Four months before 9/11, Ritter had said flatly, "Iraq has been disarmed. There are no Weapons of Mass Destruction of any meaningful significance." And he said, "From a military standpoint, Iraq presents zero threat to the United States."

Ritter has been radicalized since then, at least in his manner of speaking. He writes in the language of nationalism, appealing to fellow Americans to save their country from recklessness, error, rogues, and fools. The most urgent job, he says, is to rise up in November 2004 and eject "Sheriff Bush" and the "PNAC Posse." The PNAC is the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative imagination of empire. The posse is the neocon officialdom: Vice President Dick Cheney, his chief of staff Scooter Libby, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and others.

Colin Powell was not part of the posse. Ritter sees him as the one person with the stature to have stopped the rush to war. Instead, Powell's speech to the U.N. silenced the doubters. Ritter rips into him for this. Ritter takes a whole chapter to dissect Powell's speech, which he proclaims to be "a farce, full of satellite pictures that show nothing."

For example, Powell said Iraq had been buying "high specification aluminum tubes" and that "all the experts who have analyzed the tubes in our possession agree that they can be adapted for centrifuge use." But all the experts had not said that. Only some of them had.

The allegations about anthrax were baloney, too, Ritter said. In the 1980s, Iraq had had the ability to produce anthrax in liquid form only. The last batch had been produced in 1991 "and in any case," says Ritter, "we blew up the factory in 1996." Given that the shelf life of liquid anthrax is three years, none could have been left by early 2003.

Powell's speech to the U.N. was, Ritter says, "the greatest mistake of his professional career."

Ritter sums up: "The sad fact is that, on the issue of Iraq's disarmament, a brutal dictator named Saddam Hussein has proven to be more truthful than the elected government of the people of the United States."

So why does Ritter think America went to war? He offers two explanations. First is that "a rookie president from Texas got lassoed into a war with Iraq by the PNAC posse." In other words, the men Bush had recruited — his dad's men, several of them — had an ideological predisposition for war. They wanted a war because they wanted to project American power and change the world with it.

The second explanation is this: "War with Iraq was very much driven by domestic political considerations. By my calculations, as long as President Bush and his advisers believed that they would gain more politically by going to war with Iraq than they would lose by holding back, war was inevitable."

These could be both true, but they are two different reasons. Ritter doesn't parse that out.

Ritter is a man with a deep sense of caring and honesty, and a deep experience of this one subject. He has a piece of the truth. He tells you what he sees, and what seems obvious to him. If it looks like a lie, he says it's a lie. This is good as far as it goes, and refreshing after the arid world of Hans Blix. But when Sen. Joe Biden repeatedly reminds Ritter that decisions are made by persons "above your pay grade," I think: yes, and that refers not only to money.

Of the two books, Ritter's is the better. But neither is definitive about the "weapons of mass destruction," or the war. They are first cuts only. The stronger accounts will come later.

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