"The inspections started in 1991, right after the Gulf War. One of the conditions for the ceasefire was that Iraq had to do away with all of its weapons of mass destruction - biological, chemical and nuclear weapons and long-range missiles"
About this Quote
A ceasefire clause becomes, in Hans Blix's telling, the seed of an entire decade’s geopolitical theater: inspections not as a side-note to war, but as the mechanism by which war keeps its grip on the future. The sentence is deliberately procedural. It reads like minutes from a meeting, and that’s the point. Blix’s power has always been bureaucratic precision deployed against political hysteria. By anchoring the timeline ("started in 1991") and tying it to a concrete legal trigger ("one of the conditions for the ceasefire"), he frames disarmament as contract enforcement, not moral crusade.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the way the Iraq story was later sold to the public. The quote insists that the WMD question is not an abstract fear but an obligation Iraq agreed to under duress, monitored by an international apparatus that was supposed to convert battlefield victory into verifiable compliance. Listing the categories - biological, chemical, nuclear, and long-range missiles - does two things at once: it signals comprehensiveness (nothing left conveniently vague), and it exposes the rhetorical elasticity of "WMD", a phrase that can be invoked to cover everything from labs to hypotheticals.
Context matters: Blix speaks as someone who lived in the seams between law and force, when the UN’s legitimacy hinged on inspection reports while major powers treated those reports as either validation or inconvenience. The intent is to pull the discussion back to first principles: inspections were born from a ceasefire bargain. The implication is harder: if you ignore that bargain’s verification process, you’re not enforcing international order - you’re shopping for a pretext.
The subtext is a quiet rebuke to the way the Iraq story was later sold to the public. The quote insists that the WMD question is not an abstract fear but an obligation Iraq agreed to under duress, monitored by an international apparatus that was supposed to convert battlefield victory into verifiable compliance. Listing the categories - biological, chemical, nuclear, and long-range missiles - does two things at once: it signals comprehensiveness (nothing left conveniently vague), and it exposes the rhetorical elasticity of "WMD", a phrase that can be invoked to cover everything from labs to hypotheticals.
Context matters: Blix speaks as someone who lived in the seams between law and force, when the UN’s legitimacy hinged on inspection reports while major powers treated those reports as either validation or inconvenience. The intent is to pull the discussion back to first principles: inspections were born from a ceasefire bargain. The implication is harder: if you ignore that bargain’s verification process, you’re not enforcing international order - you’re shopping for a pretext.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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