Delegation success and policy failure: Collective delegation and the search for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction

Law and Contemporary Problems

Volumn 71, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 283-312

  Tierney, Michael J ^a  

^a Dept of Economics and Thomas Jefferson Program in Public Policy at the College of William and Mary

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EID: 48949088561     PISSN: 00239186     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (179)

1. John King & Suzanne Malveaux, Bush: U.S. Will Move on Iraq If U.N. Won't, CNN, Sept. 13, 2002, available at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/09/12/bush.speech.un/ (last visited Feb. 3, 2008).
2. UN Charter art. 23, 27. The formal rules for passing resolutions at the UN Security Council specify that a resolution must receive at least nine of the fifteen votes and that none of the five permanent members votes against the resolution.
3. See Curtis Bradley & Judith Kelley, The Concept of International Delegation, 71 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 1, 6,. fig. 1 (Winter 2008). This article explores a case of "international delegation" under the Bradley and Kelley typology, discussed as "collective redelegation," using UNMOVIC as an example of an "other international body."
4. For a comparable illustration with proper, nouns that correspond to the case of UN weapons inspectors, see Figure 2, infra Part IV.
5. S.C. Res. 1284, 4084, UN Doc. S/RES/1284 (Dec. 17, 1999). In terms of the Bradley and Kelley typology of delegation, the UN Security Council had delegated the authority to monitor, do research, and give advice. Whereas Bradley and Kelley suggest that "monitoring and enforcement" go together as one of the eight forms of delegation they identify, in this case the IAEA, UNMOVIC, and (previously) UNSCOM only had the authority to monitor. Enforcement of the disarmament resolution was left to the member states.
6. BOB WOODWARD, PLAN OF ATTACK 240 (2d ed. 2004). On the view of the U.S. Administration in late 2002, Bob Woodward explains, "The intelligence indicated that Blix was not reporting everything and not doing all the things he maintained he was doing. Some of the Principals believed that Blix was a liar. In any case, it looked like the inspections effort was not sufficiently aggressive, would take months or longer and was likely doomed to fail."
7. For other exemplary criticisms suggesting UNMOVIC and the IAEA were unresponsive to U.S. demands, see David Albright, Persistent or Pushover: Views of Blix's Record Vary, WASH. POST, Dec. 5, 2002, at A01;
8. Gregory Copley, Hans Blix and the Politics of Smug Myopia, DEFENSE AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS STRATEGIC POLICY, Mar. 2004, at 3 ("I will be blunt: Blix is a liar through distortion, omission and misrepresentation. He has shown his political colors, and they are anti-US.");
9. Helena Smith & Ewan MacAskill, As Arms Inspectors Arrive, Row Erupts over US Smears, GUARDIAN, Nov. 19, 2002, at 1;
10. Steven R. Weisman, To White House, Inspector Is Now More a Dead End than a Guidepost, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 2, 2003, at A13;
11. Byron York, Blix-krieg, NATIONAL REVIEW, Oct. 1, 2002, at 31.
12. Mona Lyne et al., Who Delegates: Alternative Models of Principals in Development Aid, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 44 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
13. Darren Hawkins et al., Delegation Under Anarchy: States, International Organizations, and Principal-Agent Theory, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 11 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006).
14. See Barbara Koremenos, When, What, and Why Do States Choose to Delegate? 71 LAW & CONTEMP. PROBS. 151 (Winter 2008).
15. See also GOLDSTEIN ET AL., LEGALIZATION AND WORLD POLITICS 1-8 (2001).
16. See Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 7.
17. See George Downs et al., Is the Good News about Compliance Good News for Cooperation?, 50 INT'L ORG. 379, 380-81 (1996).
18. Although legal scholars have a long tradition of taking treaty language and rules seriously, such a practice is the exception among international relations (IR) scholars, to whom rules are either irrelevant, see John Mearsheimer, The False Promise of International Institutions, 19 INT'L SECURITY 7 (1994), or reflect underlying interests. The concept of "regime" was preferred to "organization" in part because the former approach could accommodate the informal rules and norms that seemed to account for much of the behavior that scholars observed but could not explain as a result of organizational voting power and formal decision rules.
19. See generally KEITH MIDDLEMAS, ORCHESTRATING EUROPE: THE INFORMAL POLITICS OF EUROPEAN UNION 1973-1995 (1995) (arguing that a focus on codified treaties and formal rules within IOs actually obscures more than it reveals and "make[sc] it difficult for these theories to offer accurate explanations"). The growth of formal IOs and the concomitant increase in the legalization of world politics provide incentives to revisit the impact of formal rules on international outcomes and state behavior.
20. See John Pevehouse et al., International Governmental Organizations, in THE POLITICS OF GLOBAL GOVERNANCE 9-24 (Paul F. Diehl ed., 2005) (tracing growth of IOs);
21. JUDITH L. GOLDSTEIN ET AL., LEGALIZATION AND WORLD POLITICS (2001) (considering legalization of world politics). Recent empirical work in this tradition suggests that formal rules may do a reasonable job accounting for patterns of outcomes in and around IOs.
22. See, e.g., Mona Lyne et al., Who Delegates: Alternative Models of Principals in Development Aid, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 41-76 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
23. Daniel Nielson & Michael J. Tierney, Delegation to International Organizations: Agency Theory and World Bank Environmental Reform, 57 INT'L ORG. 241 (2003);
24. Daniel Nielson & Michael J. Tierney, Theory, Data, and Hypothesis Testing: World Bank Environmental Reform Redux, 59 INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATION 785 (2005);
25. Mark Pollack, Learning from the Americanists (Again): Theory and Method in the Study of Delegation, WEST EUROPEAN POLITICS, Jan. 2002, at 200;
26. David P. Rapkin & Jonathan R. Strand, Reforming the IMF's Weighted Voting System, 29 WORLD ECONOMY 305 (2006);
27. Roger Congleton, Agency Problems and the Allocation of International Environmental Grants: The Return to Rio, 20 ECONOMIA DELLE SCELTE PUBBLICHE 125 (2003).
28. See generally Nielson & Tierney, Theory, Data, and Hypothesis Testing: World Bank Environmental Reform Redux, supra note 9;
29. Mona Lyne & Michael J. Tierney, The Politics of Common Agency: Implications for Agent Control with Complex Principals (Aug. 28-31, 2003) (unpublished paper presented at Am. Pol. Sci. Ass'n Meeting).
30. See generally GARY W. COX, MAKING VOTES COUNT: STRATEGIC COORDINATION IN THE WORLD'S ELECTORAL SYSTEMS (1997);
31. AREND LIJPHART, PATTERNS OF DEMOCRACY: GOVERNMENT FORMS AND PERFORMANCE IN 36 COUNTRIES (1999);
32. MATTHEW SOBERG SHUGART & JOHN M. CAREY, PRESIDENTS AND ASSEMBLIES: CONSTITUTIONAL DESIGN AND ELECTORAL DYNAMICS (1992).
33. See ARTHUR LUPIA & MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS, THE DEMOCRATIC DILEMMA: CAN CITIZENS LEARN WHAT THEY NEED TO KNOW? 4-13 (1998).
34. A few positive results reveal little because of problems of observational equivalence, but if large numbers of studies are done within a given research tradition, then such accumulation of positive findings provides greater confidence in the utility of the approach. On accumulation of knowledge, see generally Gary KING ET AL., DESIGNING SOCIAL INQUIRY: SCIENTIFIC INFERENCE IN QUALITATIVE RESEARCH (1994).
35. This research strategy is distinct from the predominant approach to framing research in international relations, which has been to set up a "three-cornered fight" in which theory X and theory Y occupy two corners and the evidence occupies the third corner. The two theories make contested conjectures about the same evidence, which is used to choose between them. See Colin Elman & Miriam Elman, Lessons from Lakatos, in PROGRESS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS THEORY: APPRAISING THE FIELD 21-68 (Colin Elman & Miriam Elman eds., 2004) (describing such "three-cornered fights"). This is not the strategy that institutionalists have pursued in American politics, comparative politics, or economics. To paraphrase the editor of a prominent journal in advocating a normal scientific approach: Stop worrying about the alternative theory so much. Its champions will claim that you have mis-characterized their model no matter how careful you are. Concentrate on making your own argument and then testing it. If lots of people do that for the next ten years, then we will have some sense about whether you are onto something. Confidential Editorial Comments, provided by a Prominent Social Science Journal Editor, via email exchange (May 2002).
36. UNSCOM is the United Nations Special Commission tasked by the Security Council to monitor Iraq's compliance with various UN Security Council resolutions ending the 1990-1991 Gulf War. UNMOVIC is the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission established in 1999 to replace UNSCOM. For a clear description and history, see Sean D. Murphy, Efforts to Address Iraqi Compliance with UN Weapons Inspections, 96 AM. J. OF INT'L L. 956 (2002). The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) predated the conflict in Iraq, but due to its technical expertise, it was tasked by the Security Council in 1991 and again in 1999 to monitor Iraqi compliance in the area of nuclear programs.
37. See generally BARBARA KOREMENOS ET AL., THE RATIONAL DESIGN OF INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS (2001);
38. MARK POLLACK, THE ENGINES OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION (2003);
39. Nielson & Tierney, Theory, Data, and Hypothesis Testing: World Bank Environmental Reform Redux, supra note 9;
40. Darren Hawkins et al., Delegation under Anarchy: States, International Organizations, and Principal Agent Theory, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 3-38 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
41. Alex Thompson, Coercion Through IOs: The Security Council and the Logic of Information Transmission, 60 INT'L ORG. 1 (2006);
42. Michael Lipson, Between Iraq and a Hard Place: U.N. Arms Inspections and the Politics of Security Council Resolution 1441 (Sept. 3, 2006) (unpublished paper presented at APSA Conference).
43. In order to develop a general approach to international delegation, our definitions must be broader than "a grant of authority by a state to an international body...." There are two reasons for this, and both are revealed in the cogent discussion by Bradley and Kelley. First, because of the possibility of redelegation, any given delegation contract may not involve a state, but rather come from some international body that is itself acting on the basis of delegated authority. Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 5.
44. Second, and more importantly, most delegations of authority to international bodies or even to other states do not arise from individual decisions by states, but through collective decisions by groups of states that are authorized to delegate, redelegate, or change an existing delegation contract. Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 6-9. In the case study that follows, no individual state had the authority to create UNSCOM, direct it, hire its personnel, or fire its leader. Of course, any discussion of principals and agents could be avoided even while still developing a general framework and using new terms such as "delegator," "delegators," "entity," "delegatee," or "trustee." But, as argued below, any delegation of authority implies "principals" and "agents." Hence, I use these conventional terms in this article.
45. For the clearest discussion in the international relations literature, see KENNETH WALTZ, THEORY OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS (1979).
46. But see the theoretical intuition, developed in OLIVER E. WILLIAMSON, MARKETS AND HIERARCHIES: ANALYSIS AND ANTITRUST IMPLICATIONS (1975),
47. and the formal proofs found in JEAN TIROLE & DREW FUDENBERG, PERFECT BAYESIAN AND SEQUENTIAL EQUILIBRIA: A CLARIFYING NOTE (1988), or any modern textbook of micro- or new-institutional economics.
48. You can delegate authority to a plumber to fix your pipes because you own the pipes and thus have the ultimate right to do with them as you please. A plumber who works on your pipes without your approval is called a Good Samaritan, or a vandal. A plumber who works on your pipes after you have authorized him to do so is called an agent.
49. In this view the U.S. Constitution is a delegation contract that identifies the ultimate principals, "We the people..." and their various agents - Congress, President, the courts, and other authoritative political bodies.
50. See Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 17 (noting that such authority can be, and often is, redelegated to other bodies, and that the ultimate source of authority stems from the sovereignty of states). In fact, the case study, infra Part IV, illustrates this point clearly: Through the UN Charter, member states of the UN first delegate authority to the Security Council to resolve issues of peace and security, and then the Security Council redelegates parts of that authority to UNSCOM, the IAEA, and UNMOVIC.
51. This paper does not suggest that abdications of authority (for example, the shift from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution in 1789) are impossible empirically, or that one should not explain them; but abdication is qualitatively distinct from delegation and should not be confused with it, especially when such conflation can lead to flawed tests of resulting hypotheses. The distinction also has political weight since politicians and activists often make claims that IOs are increasingly "unaccountable." See generally Ruth Grant & Robert Keohane, Accountability and Abuses of Power in World Politics, 99 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 29 (2005);
52. Andrew Moravcsik, Is There a Democratic Deficit in World Politics: A Framework for Analysis, 39 GOV'T AND OPPOSITION 336 (2004). Legal scholars should care about these definitional issues for similar reasons, as Sarooshi explains: "Failure to distinguish between different types of conferrals of powers confuses analysis of the differing legal consequences of these conferrals and obfuscates the domestic policy debates that surround their conferral."
53. DAN SAROOSHI, INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS AND THEIR EXERCISE OF SOVEREIGN POWERS 1 (2005).
54. Ronald H. Coase, The Nature of the Firm, 4 ECONOMICA 387, 387-89 (1937).
55. All the major works in political science that attempt to explain the causes or consequences of delegating authority employ a similar logic borrowed from Williamson, and they all use the well-established terms of "principal" and "agent" to describe the strategic actors in a delegation relationship. As Hawkins et al. explain, principals and agents are constituted by the act of delegation. See DARREN HAWKINS ET AL., DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 7 (2006).
56. If you have delegation, then you have principals and agents by definition. See generally DAVID EPSTEIN & SHARYN O'HALLORAN, DELEGATING POWERS: A TRANSACTION COST POLITICS APPROACH TO POLICY MAKING UNDER SEPARATE POWERS (1999);
57. JOHN HUBER & CHARLES SHIPAN, DELIBERATE DISCRETION: THE INSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATIONS OF BUREAUCRATIC AUTONOMY (2002);
58. RODERICK KIEWIET & MATHEW D. MCCUBBINS, THE LOGIC OF DELEGATION: CONGRESSIONAL PARTIES AND THE APPROPRIATIONS PROCESS (1991);
59. Terry Moe, The New Economics Organization, 28 AM. J. OF POL. SCI. 739 (1984);
60. Pollack, supra note 9 (suggesting scholars should be "learning from the Americanists, again"). The take-home message from Pollack is that scholars should not reinvent the wheel in studies of delegation within the context of the European Union.
61. SAROOSHI, supra note 22, at 55.
62. See especially chapters 3-5, in which Sarooshi develops a typology of conferrals of sovereign power to IOs. Like Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, he includes the legal possibility of "full transfers" of sovereign authority, but he argues that these are distinct from "delegations" of authority, which are conditional by definition.
63. See SAROOSHI, supra note 22, at 29-30 (noting that, even in the case of "full transfers," "in practice... it would seem that conferrals of powers are always revocable so long as the State has retained its independent legal personality and not merged its powers and personality into a larger political unit").
64. This definition follows from Torbjorn Bergman et al., Introduction: Parliamentary Democracy and the Chain of Delegation, 37 EUR. J. OF POL. RES. 255, 257 (2000);
65. Kiewiet & McCubbins, supra note 24, at 4-5.
66. Moe, supra note 24, at 757.
67. Although this approach is consistent with Hawkins, supra note 16, at 11, Bradley and Kelley provide a much more comprehensive typology and discussion of the various forms of international delegation - and thus the range of actual strategies that are available to states.
68. Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 10-17.
69. E.g., Congleton, supra note 9;
70. Helen Milner, Why Multilateralism? Foreign Aid and Domestic Principal-Agent Problems, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 107 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
71. Mark Copelovitch, Master or Servant: Agency Slack and the Politics of IMF Lending (Nov. 17-18, 2006) (unpublished paper presented at IPES Meeting).
72. See generally BERTIN MARTENS, THE INSTITUTIONAL ECONOMICS OF FOREIGN AID (2002);
73. Alexander Cooley & James Ron, The NGO Scramble: Organizational Insecurity and the Political Economy of Transnational Action, 27 INT'L SECURITY 5 (2002);
74. Steve Radelet, A Primer on Foreign Aid (Center for Global Development Working Paper, No. 92, 2006).
75. See generally Darrel Hawkins & Wade Jacoby, How Agents Matter, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 199 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
76. Geoffrey Garrett, The Politics of Legal Integration in the European Union, 49 INT'L ORG. 171 (1995);
77. Geoffrey Garrett & George Tsebelis, Agenda Setting Power, Power Indices, and Decision Making in the European Union, 16 INT'L REV. OF L. AND ECON. 345 (1996);
78. Pollack, supra note 14, at 165.
79. See generally Alex Thompson, Screening Power: International Organizations as Informative Agents, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 229 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
80. Alex Thompson, Coercion Through IOs: The Security Council and the Logic of Information Transmission, 61 INT'L ORG. 1 (2006);
81. Lyne et al., supra note 9.
82. See Lyne & Tierney, supra note 10, at 6 for the example of the Concert of Europe, in which a group of states (great powers in nineteenth-century Europe) collectively granted authority to one of their members (France) to put down a rebellion in Naples. Political scientists are not alone in recognizing that a single state can be construed as an agent of another state under international law. As former president of the IJC, Eduardo Jimenez de Arechaga, explains, "The 1923 Treaty between Switzerland and Liechtenstein... seemed to constitute a case of agency, in which one State entrusted another with the power to represent it not only for the purpose of concluding certain treaties, but also for the purpose of claiming rights under those treaties."
83. Sarooshi, supra note 22, at 33 (illustrating the point that "principal" and "agent" have a specific meaning in international law and that meaning is consistent with the conventional use of these terms in political science and economics).
84. See generally Lipson, supra note 16.
85. Leslie Johns, A Servant of Two Masters: Communication and the Selection of International Bureaucrats, 61 INT'L ORG. 245 (2007).
86. See, e.g., Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 9.
87. Kiewiet & McCubbins, supra note 24;
88. KEITH KREHBIEL, INFORMATION AND LEGISLATIVE ORGANIZATION (1991);
89. Thomas Gilligan & Keith Krehbiel, Specialization Decisions Within a Committee, 13 J. L. ECON. & ORG. 366 (1989).
90. Thompson, supra note 32, at 229.
91. Often this intermediary takes the form of an executive board that contains representatives from some or all of the member states. For a graphic illustration of such a delegation within the Asian Development Bank, see.Lyne et al., supra note 9, at 45, Fig. 1.
92. See discussion infra Part IV for analysis of one example. For a broader discussion of the frequency of such delegation in international relations, see Koremenos, supra note 7.
93. Once a state is a member of a collective body, council, or board, it can certainly quit and thus remove itself from the membership of a collective principal, but it cannot act individually to fire or provide authoritative instructions (redelegation) to the ultimate agent.
94. See supra note 24.
95. See Randall Calvert et al., A Theory of Political Control and Agency Discretion, 33 AM. J. OF POL. SCI. 588 (1989);
96. Epstein & O'Halloran, supra note 24;
97. Thomas Hammond & Jack Knott, Who Controls the Bureaucracy? Presidential Power, Congressional Dominance, Legal Constraints, and Bureaucratic Autonomy in a Model of Multi-Institutional Policy-Making, 12 J. L. ECON. & ORG. 119 (1996). Although the control of bureaucratic agents may be enhanced by inter-branch cooperation, it is simply not the case that agent recontracting requires cooperation between the President and Congress. Both of these principals have their own contract with the bureaucratic agent, and both have the authority to alter that contract unilaterally.
98. Pollack, supra note 16, at 75-154.
99. See, e.g., Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 7 (discussing delegation to a "collective body or subgroup," as illustrated in Fig. 1).
100. Kiewiet & McCubbins, supra note 24.
101. David Lake, Delegating Divisible Sovereignty: Some Conceptual Issues 7 (Mar. 3-4, 2006) (unpublished paper for Workshop on Delegating Sovereignty), offers a telling example when he explains, "As a liberal democrat in a heavily republican Congressional district, I am typically very unhappy with the way my representative votes on legislation, but it would be inappropriate to say that he is shirking his responsibility when he follows the wishes of the majority of my neighbors." Similarly, and obviously, Lake cannot independently vote his representative out of office. Therefore, he is not a principal of his representative.
102. Note that most of the literature refers to the first type of principal as a "single principal." To avoid confusion, this article uses the same terminology. However, a more accurate description would be "single-unitary principal." Strictly speaking a "collective principal" is a single principal composed of more than one individual - its corporate nature is the distinguishing feature.
103. This extensive literature is reviewed in Hammond & Knott, supra note 43.
104. Fearou and Lohman both characterize voters as multiple principals of elected officials. James D. Fearon, Electoral Accountability and the Control of Politicians: Selecting Good Types Versus Sanctioning Poor Performance, in DEMOCRACY, ACCOUNTABILITY, AND REPRESENTATION 55-97 (Adam Przeworksi et al. eds., 1999);
105. Suzanne Lohmann, An Information Rationale for the Power of Special Interests, 92 AM. POL. SCI. REV. 809 (1998).
106. For a more recent example focusing on IOs, see the modeling assumptions in Johns, supra note 35, at 248-58.
107. See Xu-yi Chong & Patrick Weller, International Civil, Servants:THe Forgotten Power 6 (2004) (unpublished paper presented at the 2004 meeting of the SGIR's Sixth Pan-European International Relations Conference);
108. see also Grant & Keohane, supra note 22, at 29-30.
109. On the Consensus Rule in NATO, see generally Michael Leo, NATO Decision-Making: Au Revoir to the Consensus Rule?, 202 STRATEGIC FORUM 1 (2003).
110. For complications in the context of the intervention in Kosovo, see generally David Auerswald et al., Double Hats, Triple the Trouble: Agency Problems in NATO Interventions (Sept. 2, 2006) (unpublished paper delivered at the American Political Science Association Conference).
111. Leo Van Houtven, Governance of the IMF: Decision Making, Institutional Oversight, Transparency, and Accountability, IMF PAMPBLET SERIES 53, Aug. 12, 2002, at 1, 73-74.
112. Moravcsik, supra note 23, at 336 concurs and explains the concept clearly: "Sovereignty is delegated when supranational actors are permitted to take certain autonomous decisions, without an intervening interstate vote or unilateral veto."
113. See, e.g., Karen J. Alter, Delegation to International Courts and the Limits of Re-Contracting Political Power, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 312-38 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006);
114. Andrew Cortell & Susan Peterson, Dutiful Agents, Rogue Actors, or Both? Staffing, Voting Rules, and Slack in the WHO and WTO, in DELEGATION AND AGENCY IN INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS 255-80 (Hawkins et al. eds., 2006). Both make similar points about the political effects of international decision rules in other empirical contexts.
115. COLIN POWELL, MY AMERICAN JOURNEY 507-42 (1996);
116. NORMAN SCHWARTZKOPF, IT DOESN'T TAKE A HERO 451-72 (1993).
117. S.C. Res. 687, UN Doc S/RES/687 (Apr. 3, 1991). Resolution 687 stated that "Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless" of all named categories of weapons and their related research and production facilities. The regime was modified in August 1991 by Resolution 707, which gave inspectors the authority to fly unfettered throughout Iraqi airspace and required Iraq to provide assistance in this regard.
118. See UN Charter art. 42 (making the resolution binding on all UN member states and implying that military force could be used to enforce the resolution if Iraq did not comply).
119. Whereas the IAEA was a large standing organization with its own employees and budget, UNSCOM was created anew for the purpose of monitoring Iraqi compliance. The total number of staff working for UNSCOM at any given time ranged between 100 and 120.
120. Id. ¶ 8-10, 12-13.
121. Usually, this meant intelligence and analysis from the United States or the United Kingdom, but UNSCOM also asked for and received raw intelligence information other UN members, including France, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
122. See generally DAVID M. MALONE, THE INTERNATIONAL STRUGGLE OVER IRAQ: POLITICS IN THE U.N. SECURITY COUNCIL 1980-2005 (2006) (see especially chapter 6);
123. SCOTT RITTER, ENDGAME: SOLVING THE IRAQ PROBLEM - ONCE AND FOR ALL (1999).
124. G.S. Pearson, THE UNSCOM SAGA: CHEMICAL AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS NON-PROLIFERATION 28-32 (1999);
125. Alex Thompson, Principal Problems: The Rise and Fall of U.N. Weapons Inspections in Iraq (Mar. 22-25, 2006) (unpublished paper presented at the International Studies Association meeting).
126. In an excellent analysis of the Iraq inspections regime using a P-A framework and formal methods, Johns, supra note 35, at 269, adopts conventional concepts from a multiple principals model to analyze the case. She repeatedly refers to the members of the Security Council as if they were principals in their own right. For example, "Blix's reports during this time period often induced intense conflict amongst his political principals." As the collective-principal model suggests, as UN rules clearly state, and as the case study illustrates, Blix had only one principal-an authorized supermajority on the Security Council. This made changing the status quo very difficult, and it gave Blix and El Baradei great discretion.
127. Ritter, supra note 62, at 194;
128. Thompson, supra note 63, at 8-18.
129. As always, a winning coalition on the UN Security Council requires a supermajority plus the acquiescence of all five of the permanent members. In order to redirect the inspectors, Russia and France would, at minimum, need to convince the U.S. and Britain to go along.
130. JEAN E. KRASNO & JAMES S. SUTTERLIN, THE UNITED NATIONS AND IRAQ: DEFANGING THE VIPER 41-77 (2003);
131. Pearson, supra note 63, at 41;
132. Ritter, supra note 62, at 194-95.
133. See generally Charles Duelfer, Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD (2004) (unpublished report delivered to the CIA). Researchers now know that the inspection regime was extremely effective, since the U.S. military has subsequently occupied the entire country of Iraq and the Director of Central Intelligence tasked the Iraq Survey Group (ISG) to conduct a detailed investigation into Iraqi WMD programs. The ISG spent more money in one year than UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, and the IAEA had spent in twelve years combined; employed thousands of personnel compared to hundreds of 10 inspectors; and enjoyed unfettered access to all sites within Iraq. Yet it found no evidence that Iraq had any WMD at the time of the U.S. invasion. Hence, it is reasonable to conclude that the UN weapons inspectors were highly effective at their job. Iraq had been completely disarmed of WMD by the spring of 2003 and probably much earlier.
134. See Fig. 2, infra Part IV.B.
135. See S.C. Res 715, UN Doc S/RES/15 (Oct. 11, 1991). These lines of authority were strengthened and clarified in Resolution 715 in October 1991 when UNSCOM was named as a "subsidiary organ of the Security Council."
136. See Lipson, supra note 16, at 11. The original Executive Chairman of UNSCOM was Rolf Ekeus, a Swede who served from 1991 to 1996. Ekeus was followed by Richard Butler, an Australian diplomat who served from 1997 until UNSCOM ceased its operations in January 1999.
137. See Cortell & Peterson, supra note 55, at 255-80, for a discussion of how staffing rules within IOs affect the independence of different 10 agents. As Krasno & Sutterlin, supra note 67, at 25, explain, "UNSCOM was structured in such a way as to preclude any possibility of General Assembly involvement, even in its financing." This contract was designed to ensure that UNSCOM staff would be insulated from any demands other than those issued by an authorized supermajority coalition on the UN Security Council (all five permanent members plus at least four elected members).
138. For a similar argument about how principals at time T1 design contracts to insulate their agents from political meddling by others at time T2, see David E. Lewis, The Adverse Consequences of the Politics of Agency Design for Presidential Management in the United States, 34 BRIT. J. POL. Sci. 377, 395-402 (2004);
139. Nielson & Tierney, Delegation to International Organizations, supra note 9.
140. As one UN official explained in November 1998, "You can never have 100 percent proof of disarmament... so at some point technical exercise gives way to political judgment.... At some point it becomes impossible to prove the negative." Barton Gellman, U.N. Team Downcast Abbut Iraq, Mission; Inspectors Note Eroded Authority, WASH. POST, Nov. 22, 1998, at A01.
141. See, e.g., Amin Saikal, Iraq, UNSCOM and the US A UN Debacle?, 53 AUSTL. J. INT'L AFF. 283, 287 (1999);
142. Ritter, supra note 62, at 143-44.
143. See also an official rebuke in a letter from Kofi Anan to the President of the Security Council, S.C. Res 1172, UN Doc S/1998/1172 (Dec. 18, 1998). Ironically, this example of one member of the UN Security Council's using clandestine means to infiltrate a UN body and perform intelligence operations not authorized by the UN Security Council reveals the limit of any approach that focuses exclusively on formal lines of authority. Of course, once this activity was revealed, the collective principal fired the agent and created an entirely new one (UNMOVIC) with checks and balances designed to prevent this type of agency slack.
144. The U.S. government had now confirmed in official policy what Iraq had been claiming for years - that no amount of compliance would convince Washington to vote to lift the, sanctions. In late 1998, Secretary of State Madeline Albright suggested that sanctions might continue indefinitely. Later that year, the U.S. Congress passed a resolution calling for regime change in Iraq. Any incentive for cooperation from gaddarn Hussein was then gone, and UNSCOM inspectors knew it.
145. S/RES/1284, supra note 4.
146. Id.
147. Malone, supra note 62, at 167.
148. Figure 2 is very similar to Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 6, except that Figure 2 has proper nouns inserted in place of the general concepts represented by Bradley and Kelley. Lines with arrows represent delegations of authority. Consistent with Bradley and Kelley's conceptions of international delegation at Stage 1, all individual states that have signed and ratified the UN Charter have conferred on the Security Council the "primary responsibility for the maintenance of peace and security." They also agree that in doing so, the UN Security Council "acts on their behalf." See UN Charter art. 42, supra note 58.
149. Supra note 3, at 6.
150. As always, nine of fifteen, with the caveat of unanimity among the P5.
151. For a detailed comparison and a compelling argument about the role of organizational culture within different IOs, see generally Lipson, supra note 16.
152. Robert L. Brown, Non-Proliferation Through Delegation, Ch., 7 (2007) (unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Univ. of Cal.-San Diego) (on file with author).
153. Bradley and Kelley have five ordinally ranked categories displayed along
154. HANS BLIX, DISARMING IRAQ 241-50 (2004).
155. Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 14-15.
156. See William Horsley, Polls Find Europeans Oppose Iraq War, BBC, Feb. 11, 2003, http://new.s.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/2747175.stm (last visited Feb. 9, 2008);
157. Gallup Int'l, Iraq Poll 2003, http://www.gallup-international.com (follow "Survey Archive" hyperlink; then follow "Survey Overview" hyperlink; then follow Iraq Poll 2003 hyperlink) (last visited Feb. 3, 2008);
158. TRIP survey data reported infra Part VI.
159. For extensive results from the TRIP survey, see Maliniak et al., The View from the Ivory Tower. TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculty in the United States and Canada, Program on the Theory and Practice of International Relations (2007).
160. For analysis of the earlier survey data, see Alex Thompson, Understanding IO Legitimation, in THE POLITICS OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS: BRIDGING THE RATIONALIST-CONSTRUCTIVIST DIVIDE (Tierney & Weaver eds., 2008).
161. Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 30.
162. Richard Cheney, Vice President Honors Veterans of Korean War, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF THE PRESS SECRETARY (Aug. 29, 2002), http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020829-5.html (last visited Feb. 3, 2008).
163. BOB WOODWARD, PLAN OF ATTACK 125 (2004).
164. See generally ANDREW BENNET ET AL., FRIENDS IN NEED: BURDEN SHARING IN THE PERSIAN GULF WAR (1997).
165. James Bone, Blix Should Turn the 'Smoking Gun' On His Own Head, LONDON TIMES, Mar. 12, 2003, available at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/iraq/article1118964.ece (last visited Feb. 10, 2008).
166. Rebecca Johnson, Looking Towards 2010: What Does the Nonproliferation Regime Need?, 84 DISARMAMENT & DIPL. (2007), available at http://www.acronym.org.uk/dd/dd84/84npt.htm (last visited Feb. 3, 2008).
167. For more on the survey and the broader project, see Daniel Maliniak et al., Inside the Ivory Tower, FOR. POL'Y 62 (Mar./Apr. 2007);
168. Maliniak et al., The View from the Ivory Tower: TRIP Survey of International Relations Faculty in the United States and Canada, Program on the Theory and Practice of International Relations (2007).
169. See generally Ian Hurd, Legitimacy and Authority in International Politics, 53 INT'L ORG. 379 (1999);
170. Thompson, supra note 32;
171. Erik Voeten, The Political Origins of the UN Security Council's Ability to Legitimize the Use of Force, 59 INT'L ORG. 527 (2005).
172. Gallup Int'l Iraq Poll 2003, http://www.gallup-international.com/ download/GIA%20press%20 release%20Iraq%20Survey%202003.pdf
173. Thompson, infra note 101.
174. The first question was, "If Iran continues to produce material that can be used to develop nuclear weapons, would you support or oppose the U.S. taking military action against Iran?" Answer options were "Support, Oppose, and Unsure." The second question was, "If Iran continues to produce material that can be used to develop nuclear weapons and the U.N. Security Council votes to use military force against Iran, would you support or oppose the international community taking military action against Iran?" Again, answer options included "Support, Oppose, and Unsure." The survey included a similar pair of questions about North Korea. Maliniak et al., supra note 93, at 44.
175. Thompson, supra note 63, at 24.
176. Bradley & Kelley, supra note 3, at 18.
177. Id. at 33.
178. See generally Alex Thompson, Understanding IO Legitimation (Mar. 5, 2005) (unpublished paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association).
179. Arthur Lupia & Matthew D. McCubbins, Representation or Abdication? How Citizens Use Institutions to Help Delegation Succeed, 37 EURO. J. POL. RES. 291, 299-301 (2000).