Sanctions Against Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Tacitly acknowledging that the U.S. campaign to contain Iraq is collapsing, the Clinton administration will support a proposal next week to ease economic sanctions against Baghdad and dilute efforts to monitor Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons programs.The proposal would remove the limits on Iraqi oil sales permitted under a United Nations-administered program, U.S. and U.N. officials said. The oil sales proceeds are used to buy food and humanitarian supplies for the Iraqi people.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - Gunmen kidnapped the head of the CARE humanitarian group in Iraq, a British-born woman in her 60s who has been critical of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq and has worked for three decades to improve living conditions here. The kidnapping of Margaret Hassan yesterday triggered appeals for her release from British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Muslim humanitarian groups. Hassan's abduction occurred on a day when militants fired mortar rounds at an Iraqi National Guard base north of the capital, killing five soldiers and wounding 80. An American contractor working for a Halliburton unit died in a mortar attack on a U.S. base in Baghdad, news agencies reported.

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration, increasingly convinced that Saddam Hussein will hold onto power even after the rout of his forces, is quietly forging a strategy to prompt a coup in Baghdad by preventing the Iraqi president from rebuilding his shattered economy and offering a brighter future to his war-weary people.Senior U.S. officials said yesterday that the United States intends to maintain the economic sanctions that block Iraqi oil exports, depriving Saddam of the money his country desperately needs to recover from the allied bombing.

BAGHDAD, Iraq - By the second movie in the triple feature at Al Najoom theater, the projector had to cut through a thick cloud from the chain-smoking men killing an afternoon watching an obscure American action film. The floors were sticky from spilled soda and candy, the subtitles were in Chinese, and the Showdown in Little Tokyo picture trailed the sound by at least three seconds. For admission costing the equivalent of about 65 cents, the moviegoers, if they could bear it, could sit through all three films - Dolph Lundgren's Showdown in Little Tokyo, Demi Moore's Striptease and an Egyptian romance film.

JERUSALEM - Beginning his first major overseas trip as secretary of state, Colin L. Powell was thrown on the defensive yesterday over the issue that a decade ago made him a hero to Americans and Persian Gulf Arabs: U.S. policy toward Iraq. Arriving in Cairo to a hostile reception in the Egyptian news media, Powell was treated to further criticism of United Nations sanctions against Iraq at a joint news conference with Egypt's foreign minister, Amr Moussa, after meeting with President Hosni Mubarak.

Iran is run by a duumvirate. The Good Iranian supports sanctions against Iraq. The Bad Iranian seeks holy war against America. We are meant to guess which is really in charge.The Bush administration is going to sock it to the rich on home heating oil. They are going to have to pay just as high taxes as the poor, and have so much more home to heat.

UNITED NATIONS -- While the conflict in Kosovo has played out, diplomats have quietly been trying to address problems in another trouble spot: Iraq.A new proposal making the rounds at the United Nations would allow suspension of some economic sanctions against Iraq if the country opens itself to inspection by a new U.N. agency.The agency, the United Nations Commission on Inspection and Monitoring (UNCIM), would, according to a proposal being circulated by British and Dutch diplomats, take over all "assets, liabilities, staff and archives" of the controversial U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM)

U.S. relationship with Iraq is topic of presentation Persian Gulf war veteran Erik Gustafson will present a free multimedia presentation at 6 p.m. tomorrow on the United States' post-Sept. 11 relationship with Iraq and other Middle East nations. Gustafson is executive director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center and a leading advocate for termination of economic sanctions against Iraq. At tomorrow's forum, he will discuss Iraq's role in terrorism, other responses to the Iraqis, and social and political consequences of the sanctions.

When Iraq was growing anthrax and botulism diseases to use as weapons in the 1980s, it was embroiled in a seemingly endless war that it had started against a more populous country, Iran. When Iraq (it now says) dismantled these weapons, it was preparing a war of conquest against a smaller neighbor that it claimed had no right to exist, Kuwait.Iraq threatened at that time to invade a less populous but richer neighbor, Saudi Arabia. And it hurled ballistic missiles at population centers in still another country it maintained should not exist, Israel, in hopes of distracting Arab states from its own aggression against some of them.

UNITED NATIONS -- The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council have decided to continue sanctions against Iraq, but they agreed yesterday to allow Baghdad a one-time exception to sell up to $1.6 billion worth of petroleum, with part of the money to be used to buy food and medical supplies.Along with the permission to sell the oil comes a tough set of restrictions that would make sure that others, including the United Nations and countries with war-related claims against Iraq, get paid first.

PARIS - Seeking to put months of trans-Atlantic acrimony behind it, the United Nations Security Council voted overwhelmingly yesterday to lift sanctions against Iraq and grant the United States and Britain broad powers to rule the devastated nation until a new Iraqi government can take over. Despite misgivings expressed by several member states, the Security Council voted 14-0 to release the Iraqi people from the burden of economic sanctions originally imposed to punish Saddam Hussein, the deposed Iraqi strongman, for invading Kuwait in 1990.

The World Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, a longtime member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle, surrendered to U.S. troops. France proposed an end to civilian sanctions against Iraq but said the embargo could not formally end until the United Nations certified that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. Two members of the news media were being investigated amid accusations of taking looted souvenirs out of Iraq. Several U.S. servicemen were investigated in the disappearance of as much as $900,000 of the more than $600 million discovered in Baghdad.

WASHINGTON - Acknowledging that U.S. credibility is on the line, the Bush administration is considering enlisting United Nations weapons inspectors to verify any discovery by American military teams of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The role that U.N. inspectors should now play in Iraq, if any, is expected to be sharply debated in a closed-door Security Council meeting today, when inspections chief Hans Blix gives his first report since before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The United States has no intention of giving the United Nations a major role in the search for Iraq's banned weapons, which is already being conducted by U.S. military teams and experts and will be bolstered in coming weeks by hundreds of additional people, officials said.

AT FIRST GLANCE it would seem that President Bush's call for the lifting of sanctions against Iraq makes perfect sense. The regime's gone, and with it the crime that led to sanctions in the first place. No? Well, maybe. The problem is that the system of sanctions put in place after the first Persian Gulf war, and modified in 1995 to allow food for oil, is the means by which the United Nations engages with Iraq. Because of the sanctions, all of Iraq's oil sales and oil revenues are supposed to be handled by the United Nations.

U.S. relationship with Iraq is topic of presentation Persian Gulf war veteran Erik Gustafson will present a free multimedia presentation at 6 p.m. tomorrow on the United States' post-Sept. 11 relationship with Iraq and other Middle East nations. Gustafson is executive director of the Education for Peace in Iraq Center and a leading advocate for termination of economic sanctions against Iraq. At tomorrow's forum, he will discuss Iraq's role in terrorism, other responses to the Iraqis, and social and political consequences of the sanctions.

WASHINGTON - With a web of licit and illicit deals, Saddam Hussein is using Iraq's vast oil wealth to lure back old friends and bind new ones to his regime, giving them a stake in his survival and undermining efforts by President Bush to generate international support for toppling him. Baghdad's links with other countries, and with large and small companies abroad, have eased economic pressure on the regime and helped Hussein take steps toward rebuilding his...

If the United Nations were to lift its sanctions against Iraq and allow it to resume oil sales in the world market, a number of benefits would flow to American consumers, at least for the short term, experts agree.But the consequences for the other major Persian Gulf oil producers besides Iraq would not be pleasant.In the United States, gasoline prices and electricity bills could be expected to drop, if only briefly."Inflation would decline," said Henry Schuler. "That would reduce pressures on interest rates.

When you picture Iraq, what do you see? Visions of Saddam Hussein? Hidden containers of anthrax and nerve gas? Scud missiles on alert?Having visited Iraq last spring, this is what I see: dignified Muslim women begging on Baghdad street corners; young boys hawking cigarettes and kerosene to help support their families; a father running with his child into a hospital emergency room because there are so few functioning ambulances; a middle-aged man with diabetes...

THE BRITISH proposal for fewer and smarter United Nations sanctions against Iraq is overdue. Unfortunately, it is hardly assured of passage in the U.N. Security Council. For 11 years, the United Nations has kept a trade embargo on Iraq until weapons inspectors certify it free of weapons of mass destruction. Current sanctions allow the country to import food and medicine; they also supervise oil sales for food purchases. But dictator Saddam Hussein keeps his people on the edge of starvation, blaming sanctions.

SECRETARY of State Colin Powell has concluded the Bush administration's first Middle East foray, in which he tried to line up support for maintaining sanctions against Iraq. Meanwhile, his Iraqi counterpart, Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, continued stonewalling at the United Nations in New York against the resumption of U.N. weapons inspections required to lift sanctions. Mr. Powell seeks to make the sanctions smaller and "smarter," a code-word for targeting government leaders, not the Iraqi people.