POLITICS-IRAQ: Security Council Shows Wavering Unity

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Mar 3 1998 (IPS) - The U.N. Security Council had hoped to send Iraq a united and unambiguous message by approving a resolution which would insist on Baghdad’s compliance with a deal on U.N. weapons inspections – but it only achieved half of that goal.

The Council certainly acted unanimously Monday, with all 15 member states approving a resolution that warned of the “severest consequences for Iraq” of any violation of the weapons deal.

The Council’s message, however, coming after one week of haggling and the attachment of several provisos to the resolution, decidedly was ambiguous.

In particular, the United States – which, with Britain and Japan, had pushed for the resolution – has at best an uncertain basis on which to make its case if it intends to attack Iraq for any violation of the week-old accord, signed in Baghdad by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson maintained the resolution was a victory for Washington, because it sends Iraq the signal that, if it fails to allow unrestricted access to U.N. inspectors, “there will be very severe consequences.”

Annan added that “if this effort to ensure compliance thrugh negotiation is obstrcuted, by evasion or deception, as were previous efforts, diplomacy may not have a second chance. No promise of peace, and no policy of patience, can be without limits.”

The resolution – at the insistence of a wide range of nations, from Iraqi ally Russia to Brazil, France and Portugal – however also insisted upon Security Council authority over any further action. Washington only won the struggle for a vote on its resolution after it agreed to language asserting the Council’s “responsibility under the (U.N.) Charter to remain actively seized of the matter, in order to ensure implementation of this resolution, and to ensure peace and security in the area.”

Diplomats explicitly pushed that language to ensure that Washington could not use the Council’s resolution as a justification to launch an automatic attack on Baghdad if the deal hits any snags.

Now, some analysts believe, the Council has complicated the matter by requiring the United States to go back to that body – where opponents of an attack on Iraq, like China, Russia and France, hold veto power – for any authorisation to use force.

“Under this language, there’s no way (the United States) can circumvent the Council,” argued Phyllis Bennis, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank.

However, Bennis warned, that may not be a large hurdle if Washington is intent on an attack. Just as the U.S. Congress insisted on its approval before authorising then-President George Bush to begin the 1991 Gulf War against Iraq, so too might the Council be pressured into allowing U.S. military strikes in a formal vote in the future, she said.

For most U.N. diplomats, the question is one largely of semantics, since Washington has made no secret of its intention to bomb Iraq, unilaterally if necessary, once any fresh doubts are raised about Baghdad’s compliance with weapons inspections.

Richardson repeated U.S. assertions that Washington does not actually need any fresh authorisation to strike at Iraq, arguing “there is already sufficient legal authority” for such an action. The United States cited Council resolution 687, which set access to inspectors as one of the terms of the post-Gulf War cease-fire, when it justified limited strikes on Iraq in 1993 and 1996.

British Ambassador John Weston added that the Council’s warning of “severest consequences” is “not a threat – merely a statement of fact.”

If so, it is a fact which many Council members are unwilling to recognise as automatically applicable. The Council vote was delayed for several days precisely because key nations like France, Russia and China resisted the idea of offering any language which could justify the use of force. The threat of armed conflict remains a strong one, even after Annan and Aziz signed a compromise which would allow inspectors to search any sites in Iraq as long as they adopted special procedures for eight diplomatically-sensitive presidential complexes.

The United States is maintaining more than 30,000 troops in the Persian Gulf and U.S. President Bill Clinton said his country would respond “in a time, place and manner of our own choosing” to any violations of the accord.

The Council also remains divided on the question of when it may lift seven-year-old sanctions on Iraq. The Monday resolution reaffirmed the Council’s intention to act in accordance with resolution 687 in ending the embargo once Iraq complies with its demands. Yet members disagree about how extensive that compliance must be, with most countries saying Baghdad needs only to go along with the weapons inspections, while Washington insists on its cooperation with a wider range of demands.

Annan, however, asserted that the United Nations must stand prepared to lift the sanctions eventually. “All of us can agree that sanctions have added greatly to the Iraqi people’s suffering … and that someday, sooner or later – and we pray sooner – a fully disarmed and peaceable Iraq would be able to rejoin the family of nations,” he told the Security Council on Monday.

At the very least, he added, the short-term threat posed by Iraq’s refusal to allow unrestricted inspections “has now been averted.” Whether the threat of a U.S. attack has also been averted is a question that remains unresolved – even if Washington did not win all the authority it wanted for one from the Security Council.