Sanctions Against Iraq

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration is drawing up a plan to allow the United Nations Security Council to remove some sanctions against Iraq to allow Baghdad to sell petroleum for the purchase of food and medicine, the payment of war reparations and the cost of destroying weapons, senior administration officials say.The plan, which was drafted by the State Department, is being circulated for review within the department and at the Pentagon, the White House...

WASHINGTON -- President Bush said yesterday that the United States would oppose the lifting of the worldwide ban against trading with Iraq until President Saddam Hussein is forced out of power in Baghdad.His statement, along with earlier remarks by the White House spokesman, Marlin Fitzwater, indicated strongly that the United States has decided to try to drive Mr. Hussein from power through a postwar policy of economic strangulation.Implicit in the statements by Mr. Bush and his spokesman was a threat to use the veto authority that the United States holds as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council to oppose lifting the sanctions.

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.

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.

AMMAN, Jordan -- Although Jordan is holding to its uneasy neutrality in the gulf war, its diplomatic skirmishing with the United States continued yesterday over Jordanian use of Iraqi oil.Aoun Khasawneh, legal adviser to King Hussein, sharply criticized the U.S. assertion that Jordan's oil imports violate United Nations economic sanctions against Iraq.Iraq has been Jordan's only source of oil since October, when Saudi Arabia shut off its supply in anger over Jordan's neutrality. Because of that, Mr. Khasawneh said, the United Nations agreed informally that Jordan could continue getting oil from Iraq without violating the spirit of the sanctions.

WASHINGTON -- Iraq defied the United Nations' midnight deadline for withdrawal from Kuwait, erasing nearly all hope for a diplomatic alternative to war despite a final pledge last evening by the U.N. secretary-general to make "every effort" to address the Palestinian conflict.The passage of the deadline freed the United States and its principal allies, which have committed themselves politically to enforcing 12 U.N. Security Council resolutions, to drive Iraq from Kuwait by force.[Early this morning, President Bush issued a statement reiterating past U.S. pronouncements.

Stop the ShootingEditor: Can nothing be done about hunting? As things now stand the residents of Baltimore and other suburban counties must spend the week after Thanksgiving dodging bullets in their back yards while being unwilling witness to the slaughter of one of nature's most beautiful animals.Although people have complained repeatedly, in these and other pages, about some of the horrors they have experienced -- this year, for example, I was treated to the spectacle of hunters dragging two bloody deer carcasses across my front lawn -- politicians seem unwilling to listen.

WASHINGTON -- In apparent defiance of international sanctions against Iraq, a number of Europeans portrayed as hostages in Baghdad actually are technicians working voluntarily to keep the country's weapons facilities and other key industries operating, American investigators now suspect.Although the number of foreign nationals involved is believed to be small, investigators said they are helping to maintain key facilities, including Iraq's main chemical weapons plant. Some are Germans who appear to be moving in and out of Iraq freely through Jordan.

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.

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.