Sanctions Against Iraq

Iraq's recognition of Kuwait and its border is a positive step toward qualifying for lifting of United Nations sanctions against Iraq.But sanctions should not be lifted until all U.S. requirements are met. U.N. inspectors must be satisfied Iraq is clean of weapons of mass destruction. Rolf Ekeus, head of the U.N. Iraq disarmament commission, spoke of the need for more documentation on chemical and biological developments.Although France and Russia managed to block the U.N. Security Council from imposing an exclusion zone at the 32nd parallel below which Saddam Hussein's major military forces may not go, that is still a reasonable objective of U.S. policy.

CAIRO, Egypt -- Western diplomats are advocating United Nations sanctions and hinting that force is an option. Arab League officials are trying to defuse the crisis. Washington is telling U.S. citizens to evacuate an enemy pariah nation.There is defiant rhetoric about Arab unity. Bitter bombast about Western imperialism. Talk that a military action could fuel Muslim fundamentalism.It sounds like an eerie rerun of the slow slide to last year's war against Iraq.Yet this time the enemy is not Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- but Libya, led by Washington's longtime nemesis, Col. Moammar Gadhafi.

The United States and its European allies in northern Iraq wanted to be replaced by a military or police force of the United Nations. Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, said no. No it is.After a minuet of negotiations, ten U.N. personnel went into Dohuk, with sidearms for self-protection, handcuffs and no authority to investigate. They provided a presence while U.S. military personnel came for the day to fix water, sewers and electricity to receive most of the 300,000 Kurds who formerly lived there.

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.

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...

Not everybody in this country is egging President Clinton on to bomb Iraq. One voice at least is raised in protest, from Hampden.Ellen Barfield thinks the sanctions imposed in 1990 are bad enough. But the prospect of more bombing "horrifies" her.Barfield's is a voice in the wilderness, literally and figuratively. She is a peace activist linked to an organization called "Voices in the Wilderness," formed two years ago in Chicago. Its aim is to end the sanctions against Iraq, imposed by the United Nations as punishment for its invasion of Kuwait.

WASHINGTON -- The United States must go to war if it wants to dismantle Iraq's military machine and nuclear weapons program but need only continue international trade sanctions for a year to get Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, former Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger told Congress yesterday.Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Schlesinger said Iraq's economy was "bleeding" and getting worse, even though an unpublicized "official estimate" by the Bush administration said a year would be needed for sanctions to achieve their full effect.

BRICKBATS are showering Bill Clinton because he told the New York Times that if Saddam Hussein "wants a different relationship with the United States and the United Nations, all he has to do is change his behavior." Except for his suggestion that U.S. relations with Iraq could be normalized, he was right.George Bush has left the United States in an impossible dilemma. He has said the Iraqis must overthrow Saddam Hussein before the United States will support a lifting of U.N. sanctions.Since the Iraqis are unable to meet that demand and Saddam will not agree to it, the prospects for a near-term improvement in the crisis are slim.

WASHINGTON -- Defying nearly five years of intense world pressure, Iraq has preserved a weapons arsenal powerful enough to wreak mass destruction in the Middle East and is trying to improve it, according to U.S. and United Nations officials.U.S. officials believe that Iraq is hiding warheads containing chemical and biological agents, as well as dozens of Scud missiles capable of reaching Persian Gulf adversaries and Israel. Iraq has 7,000 skilled technicians ready to resume development of nuclear weapons once international pressure eases, the officials say.Iraq has managed to hang on to that arsenal in the face of nearly five years of economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations and the most intrusive arms inspections ever conducted.

PRESIDENT Bush's Thanksgiving Day message to the troops in Saudi Arabia, and to the world, could not have been clearer. He is gung ho for war on Iraq.The president's mind has been moving in that direction since mid-October, when he invited some eminent friends to the White House and discussed the possibility of war.The direction became explicit two days after the congressional elections, when he ordered up to 200,000 more soldiers to the gulf to provide an "offensive military option."Since then Bush has escalated his rhetoric.