THE WEIGHTY decision of war or peace with Iraq rests in large part on the 74-year-old shoulders of an unassuming Swedish diplomat named Hans Blix.
Some are measuring Blix, chief weapons inspector for the United Nations, for a Neville Chamberlain suit, saying that like the British prime minister who negotiated what he said was "peace in our time" with Adolf Hitler, Blix is so locked into the notion of avoiding war that he will divert his gaze from Saddam Hussein's transgressions.
"In no way does he want to be the triggerman," says Ruth Wedgwood of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. She contends that Blix will be reluctant to declare a "material breach" of the weapons accords by the Iraqis, knowing that might well lead to an American attack.
"He does not want to be associated with the American use of force," Wedgwood says. "Blix has given every indication that he intends to work patiently with this thug. ... It will be many months before Hans Blix ever announces he is at a standstill."
Others, though, argue that Blix is the perfect man for the job because he is not seen as an American cowboy riding into town eager for a gunfight. That means if Blix does find Hussein in violation of the United Nations accords, his judgment will have credibility throughout the world, rallying reluctant countries to the United States position.
"There are two perspectives on Iraq," says Natalie Goldring, director of the program on Global Security and Disarmament at the University of Maryland, College Park. "There is the U.S. perspective and essentially the rest-of-the-world's perspective.
"Blix is a rest-of-the-world guy," Goldring says. "If the U.S. thinks that makes him an obstacle, that's a mistake. They ought to be thinking of him as someone who could provide political legitimacy to a finding of Iraqi violations, something that many countries would never give to U.S. accusations."
Blix certainly cuts a different figure than his predecessor, Australian Richard Butler whose charismatic free-wheeling style seemed as in keeping with the stereotype of his countrymen as Blix's reserve does with the image of the taciturn Scandinavian.
The United States preferred another Swede, Ralf Ekeus, a former ambassador to Washington who had preceded Butler as the chief arms inspector in Iraq after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But the Security Council went with Blix when it formed the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission in 1999 to replace the Special Commission that Butler and Ekeus had led.
A scholarly man who has degrees from Sweden's University of Uppsula, Columbia University in New York and a doctorate in law from England's Cambridge University, Blix taught international law at Stockholm University before joining his country's diplomatic corps in 1963. He became Sweden's foreign minister in 1978.
In 1981, he became head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which enforces the treaty against the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He retired from that post in 1997. It is that experience that Blix's supporters and detractors point to for support of their positions.
During his time at the agency, Blix essentially missed the growth of nuclear weapons programs in Iraq and North Korea, his opponents argue.
"He certified Iraq was nuclear- free when it was undertaking any number of projects," says Stephen David, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins University.
But his supporters say that was a different era, that Blix was doing what he could under the assumption made then that nations that signed the non proliferation treaty were honestly reporting the extent of the nuclear facilities.
"I think the criticism of Blix is a little unfair," says Steve Fetter, a physicist and professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, College Park's School of Public Affairs. "Before the gulf war, he was operating under a different set of rules. There were safeguards and procedures spelling out what inspectors could do. They did not push to go beyond those limits because it was countries like Germany and Japan that were pushing back at the IAEA complaining about the cost and intrusiveness of inspections ... To Blix's credit, a lot of that changed after the gulf war."
Fetter, who worked with the IAEA while he was at the Pentagon in the early years of the Clinton administration, praised Blix for his actions during the crisis over the North Korean nuclear program in 1993 and 1994
"I think he handled that about as close to perfectly as he could," Fetter says. "He was in a very difficult position."
Then, Fetter says, it was the United States that did not want a declaration that could have led to military confrontation. Blix, he says, walked a tightrope, making clear the extent of North Korea's violations while avoiding bloodshed. "He maintained the integrity of his agency and the inspections process under very difficult conditions," Fetter says.
Blix's supporters say his experience with Iraqi and North Korean deceptions - and in transforming the IAEA into a more aggressive organization - makes him the perfect man to lead the inspections team, if for no other reason than he does not want to be fooled again.
But others say that he his old-school approach does not suit current conditions. They note his insistence on inspectors getting sensitivity training lest they offend their Iraqi hosts, statements that his team is not there to humiliate Iraq and his apparent reluctance to take advantage of funds available to spirit Iraqi scientists and their families out of the country - where they could reveal information - saying the inspection team is not a travel agency.
Avner Cohen, an independent consultant on nuclear proliferation and Middle East issues who is currently a senior research rellow at the University of Maryland's program on Global Security and Disarmament, says that Blix's training and methodology are designed "to prevent conflict and find some sort of diplomatic way to resolve disagreements.
"The whole IAEA system was built on respectful relationships between gentlemen," Cohen says. "Hans Blix is a symbol of this kind of approach, of treating every nation as a gentleman, of a presumption of innocence. There is a question, given Iraq's record of patterns of deceit of whether he is the guy to run the show."
Cohen says the situation calls for a more adversarial approach - a policeman trying to make a case, not a judge trying to objectively ascertain the facts.
All agree that the job Blix is undertaking is a daunting one. "I think the inspectors have what is essentially an impossible task," says Goldring of sending 100 inspectors into a country the size of California.
Most agree that the size of facilities needed for a nuclear program - and the chemical traces left by such activity --- make it likely those activities could be detected, though Fetter says certain rather crude machinery for enriching uranium could be easily overlooked, and Cohen says it would be almost impossible to find a small amount of enriched uranium. And all agree that chemical and biological programs are much more difficult to find in such a vast area.
"He's doing what he can do with limited manpower," says David. "It's like looking for a few needles in a big haystack."
And that means, many argue, that for Blix to be successful, he will need the intelligence that the United States says it has that Iraq has illegal weapons programs. It was U.S. intelligence on North Korea, Fetter says, that led inspectors to uncover its nuclear program. But, the U.S. intelligence has not been shared with inspectors.
That might be because the information is not the "smoking gun" the Bush administration would like it to be. Or it may be, as Wedgwood contends, because the United States fears that information given to inspectors will get to the Iraqis, allowing them to clean up suspect sites.
Wedgwood says that because of Blix's reticence, eventually the United States will have to use its intelligence to make a declaration that Iraq is in violation of the accords and should face military action.
"There may be an Adlai Stevenson moment," she says, referring to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations laying out proof of Soviet missiles in Cuba to the Security Council during the 1962 missile crisis.
Goldring says she understands why the United States did not share intelligence before the Iraqis made their 12,000- page declaration of weapons programs because it could have included suspected sites the United States had found. But now, she says, if intelligence proves omissions from the document, it should be shared with inspectors who can verify it.
"If Blix finds a violation, it's real. If the U.S. claims it, large parts of the world will automatically dismiss it," she says. "That ought to be an incentive to let him do his job and provide him with whatever information he needs to do that job."