Global Policy Forum

Hans Blix, the executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, known as UNMOVIC, will meet with National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice after addressing the Monterey Institute of International Studies. He meets Secretary of State Colin Powell on Wednesday.

Blix told Reuters his purpose was twofold: to learn U.S. policy toward Iraq, currently under review, and to let Washington know his commission's plans to resume work. ''They are now grappling with Iraqi issues. I think it would be interesting to learn what they have decided on,'' he said in reference to ideas Powell and other officials have floated on loosening decade-old sanctions on civilian goods but tightening them on military supplies.

Some 120 inspectors have been trained, about half the number the commission had at its disposal before December 1998, when the U.N. arms experts left on the eve of a U.S.-British four-day bombing raid. They have not been allowed to return.

Blix said he was trying to keep in touch with the Security Council's five permanent members, the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China, as well as some other nations with seats on the council, such as Norway, which runs the council's Iraqi sanctions committee. ''We have a duty to inform them what UNMOVIC has been doing in the past year and what kind of readiness it has,'' Blix told Reuters.

UNMOVIC also has to draw up lists for ''dual-use'' items that can be used for military as well as civilian purpose and is about to come out with a new compilation. Blix said a review of goods relating to biological and chemical weapons has been completed and ballistic missiles would soon be completed.

Restarting the inspections to verify Iraq no longer has weapons of mass destruction is a key requirement for lifting sanctions, imposed on Baghdad when it invaded Kuwait in August 1990. Iraq has rejected this, saying it had complied.

Blix's commission has been drawing up examples of unresolved disarmament issues in the ballistic missile, chemical and biological arms fields. Staff members have been preparing plans and procedures for inspections as well as considering the use of satellites to see what Iraq has been up to without ground inspections.

Nuclear weapons are handled by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Commission, which Blix, a former Swedish foreign minister, headed for 16 years. U.N. reports from Iraq in 1998 indicated Baghdad no longer had a strong nuclear and long-range ballistic missile program. But UNMOVIC's predecessor, the U.N. Special Commission or UNSCOM had never been able to account for all of Iraq's chemical and biological arms capacity, difficult to detect and easy to hide. France, Russia and others sympathetic to Iraq would like a timeline for Blix's inspections. But U.N. arms experts maintain it is difficult to set up any kind of remaining areas to probe without visiting Iraq first.