Bureaucratic heroism (and otherwise)

I've always respected Mohamed ElBaradei for his ability to do his job while still taking principled stands, and this only increases it:

Mohamed ElBaradei also warned he would not be able to continue in his role as director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency if the Islamic republic were attacked.

"A military strike [against Iran] would in my opinion be worse than anything else … It would transform the Middle East region into a ball of fire," he said in an interview with Al-Arabiya television.

Here's Scott Ritter speaking about ElBaradei in 2005:

SCOTT RITTER: Look, Mohamed ElBaradei deserves the Nobel Peace Prize, not only for the potential work that his organization can do down the road regarding Iran and North Korea, etc., but let’s take a look what this guy did. He stood up to the Security Council when it counted. In the weeks and months before the [Iraq] war, this is a man who spoke truth to power. He stared the United States in the face and said, “The data you have provided is false. It’s based on forgeries. There are no nuclear weapons in Iraq. There is no nuclear weapons program. I don’t know what you’re talking about when you say that we don’t want the smoking gun to come in the form of a mushroom cloud, because no mushroom cloud is coming out of Iraq.”

The contrast between ElBaradei's efforts to squash US propaganda and Hans Blix's willingness to play along with it couldn't have been more pronounced in the months leading up to the US assault on Iraq.  Here's the rest of Ritter's comment above:

SCOTT RITTER: Had Hans Blix, his counterpart, done the same thing, showed the same courage, you know, it would have been very difficult for the United States to try and bully the United Nations into this mad, headlong rush to war.

AMY GOODMAN: What did Hans Blix do?

SCOTT RITTER: Hans Blix was a lawyer. He parsed phrases. He didn’t commit to anything. His statements were so watered down.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

SCOTT RITTER: I call him a moral and intellectual coward. This is only an answer that Hans Blix can provide. For me, Hans Blix had an opportunity to stand up and be counted in the face of history, and history is going to condemn this man for not doing what was necessary in one of the more critical times of modern history.

This exactly echoes how I've felt since 2003.  Blix was the one person in the world who had the greatest opportunity to stop the US march to war, or at least to make the path much more difficult to follow—and instead he produced mealy-mouthed, bureaucratic assessments that allowed the Bush administration to continue pushing its lethal lies.  I've often fantasized about going to a talk of Blix's and confronting him over this during the Q&A, so I was overjoyed when Amy Goodman recently treated him to Ritter's criticisms.  I can't force myself to read Blix's response for long enough to actually reproduce it here, so let me attempt to paraphrase it as best I can:

AMY GOODMAN: That was Scott Ritter, former UN weapons inspector in Iraq in October of 2005. Hans Blix, your response?

HANS BLIX: Well, you must keep in mind that I am a sniveling coward.  I cannot state this too strongly.  I attempt never to go out of doors when the sun is in the sky, because when I do there is always a dark presence that follows me wherever I go, and I am unsure of its intentions.  Also, my penis is I suppose you would say very very small.  When I am in the washing room, I must often search for minutes on end for "little Blix", as I call him.  And it is because of my innate cowardice and this tiny penis that I failed to do what was so easily within my ability to try to prevent the murderous assault on Iraq and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings.

In any case, as unlikely as it seems, here's hoping that ElBaradei is still doing the same job in 2009, 2010, and beyond.

Comments

[angryman@24:10]

Tiny penis?

I don't understand the correlation.

[Duncan]

Me neither. I thought that in popular armchair psychology, it was the guys with little dicks who were most eager to go to war, in order to prove their "manhood."

Nothing like liblogger boy culture. I always remember it when they're getting self-righteous about gay rights.

[John Caruso]

It was actually intended neither to make sense nor to be taken seriously. Failure on all counts!

[Duncan]

Oh, I didn't take it *seriously.* But as far as not making sense, alas, it did. Your Freudian slip was showing, John.

[John Caruso]

Nope, you're misreading a pretty dopey South Park semi-reference (the Chinpokomon episode, to be exact) as much more than it is. I thought I might get some backlash, but I didn't think I'd hit one of your triggers—and I'm a bit nonplussed by the direction you took it, since spending a lot of time in the Castro in San Francisco has given me plenty of opportunity to observe that penis-length obsession is by no means particular to heterosexual males.

Let me just state for the record that I do not consider penis size to be indicative of any personality qualities, positive, negative, or otherwise. Except for Hans Blix.

Furthermore, the rest of the country has long since moved on from this whole Hans Blix penis length non-issue, and I think it's time we put it behind us as well.

[Donald Johnson]

Interesting link. I read the interview with Amy Goodman. I'm not sure Scott Ritter and you are entirely fair to Blix, but I'm going back and forth on that in my own mind. There's a place for these dull colorless bureaucratic types who merely say they haven't found any evidence of WMD's yet.

I clicked on the comment section to see what others would say about this, thinking there might be some interesting discussion. My mistake.

[John Caruso]

I clicked on the comment section to see what others would say about this, thinking there might be some interesting discussion. My mistake.

I take full responsibility for that; somehow penis jokes didn't set a high intellectual tone (though there was a good bit before that). Personally I was mainly disappointed that nobody mentioned ElBaradei...maybe if I'd lauded his hulking wang, Blix wouldn't have gotten all the attention.

Yuks aside, it'd be hard to dispute that I wasn't entirely fair to Blix, but I think Scott Ritter was. "Moral and intellectual coward" is right on the money (as are the bits about lawyerly, watered-down, overly-parsed phrases). Blix knew exactly for what purpose he was being used, and he not only willingly played the role, he did it with gusto—as when the US wanted aerial reconnaissance of future bombing sites in Iraq via U2 flyovers and Blix obligingly demanded it for them. There was no doubt in my mind how that intelligence was going to be used, and I'm sure Blix realized it as well, but he demanded it anyway. In fact I think "coward" is a generous assessment, based as it is on the assumption that he was only a plodding functionary and not an outright collaborator.

I've since choked on his denunciations of the war, since in 2003 the press was hanging on his every utterance, and all it would have taken was different framing, a different word, a different inflection for him to steer history in a much different course. Blix was the thin end of the wedge. He knew precisely what the consequences of his actions would be, as we all did: a full-scale US attack on Iraq. The difference is that he could have done something about it, and without compromising his professional integrity—just as ElBaradei did then and continues to do now. But Blix is so lacking in self-reflection that to this day he responds with unequivocal, condescending dismissiveness when asked whether he feels any sense of personal responsibility...and that's cost him the last tiny benefit of the doubt, in my mind.

[Donald Johnson]

Well, you might be right about Blix after all. I was just noticing in the NYT editorial page today that they were taking their usual role of advocating diplomacy while lying about who is committing most of the ceasefire violations.

Link

(The link is not to the NYT, but to an article showing that it's Israel doing most of the violating.)

There needs to be some sort of term (maybe there already is) for this role--the person supposedly interested in peace who actually contributes to the war propaganda of one of the two factions.