POLITICS-IRAQ: Baghdad Not Out of the Woods Yet

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 17 1998 (IPS) - U.N. weapons inspectors returned to Baghdad Tuesday and U.S. warplanes shifted back to faraway bases leaving the Iraqi government still wary of future conflict and worried about continuing sanctions.

The latest Iraqi standoff with the weapons inspectors of the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) ended at the weekend with an agreement for resumed cooperation, just minutes before a U.S. attack. Yet the standoff, by all accounts, has muddled Iraqi efforts to lift an eight-year-old sanctions regime and may only have forestalled briefly the threat of U.S. air strikes.

On the ground Tuesday, the signals were largely positive, as more than 80 UNSCOM members returned to Iraq after spending six days in nearby Bahrain, while more than 100 U.N. humanitarian workers continued to return from Jordan.

Meanwhile, except for 40 U.S. fighter planes – including several B-1 bombers reportedly based in Oman – Washington decided either to pull back forces going to the Persian Gulf or keep them stationed in the United States.

Iraq, however, remained pessimistic. “The attack has only been delayed by a week,” one Iraqi source told IPS.

The Iraqis pointed to what they claim was a hasty U.S. attempt to strike Iraq last Saturday – one so fast that a diplomatic breakthrough that morning, in which Iraqi officials informed U.N. envoy Prakash Shah in Baghdad that weapons inspections would be resumed unconditionally, came as U.S. planes were in the air ready to attack. U.S. President Bill Clinton aborted the call for air strikes after the diplomatic initiative was clarified.

There also was another reason for the Iraqi pessimism. Even though it avoided a military strike, and won back some support from allies like Russia and France, an end to sanctions looked further away than ever.

Iraq repeatedly has noted that, under U.N. Security Council resolution 687, sanctions must be lifted once UNSCOM verifies that Iraq’s chemical, biological, nuclear and long-range missile weapons have been destroyed. But Baghdad continued to believe the United States would maintain sanctions indefinitely, regardless of any progress on disarmament.

“We don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel,” Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said last week. “At the end of the tunnel, there is another tunnel.”

Nor does the posture of the United States give any comfort that the Security Council – which has promised Iraq a “comprehensive review” of all relations if it cooperates with UNSCOM – will end sanctions after such a review.

On Tuesday, U.S. Ambassador Peter Burleigh pointedly drew attention to the question of the fate of Kuwaitis missing since Iraq’s short-lived 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

“If and when the Security Council does hold a comprehensive review, it will be one of the subject matters,” Burleigh said of the missing Kuwaitis. Without any resolution on this matter there could be no lifting of sanctions, he added.

The dispute over sanctions made it less likely that the comprehensive review would result in any immediate lifting or easing of the eight-year-old embargo, according to diplomats here. That in turn would add to the suffering of the Iraqi people, argued Denis Halliday, former U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, because sanctions were estimated to result in the deaths of some 8,000 Iraqis every month.

“Sanctions are doing tremendous damage without any additional strikes,” argued Halliday, who resigned angrily from his post last month in frustration over sanctions. “They impact on every aspect of Iraqi life … The health situation remains deplorably bad, and the whole collapse of the civilian infrastructure is not fully understood (in the West).”

If the tensions of the past two weeks drew attention to sanctions, it may not have been in a way that Baghdad intended. Many Arab nations, upset with Iraq over the latest crisis, blamed Baghdad and not Washington for the standoff.

More importantly, Clinton – under domestic political pressure after calling off the air strikes – has had to strengthen his hardline stance against lifting sanctions to avoid charges that U.S. policy on Iraq has been weakened.

Yet the sanctions have not seriously hurt Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s rule, and even some supporters of the embargo appeared to have second thoughts following the latest crisis.

“The current sanctions regime is neither sustainable nor likely to end Saddam’s rule,” The Financial Times said in an editorial Tuesday – which advocated “firm deterrence” and more narrowly- targeted sanctions.