Iraq sanctions winning the war, need to be extended

By Jonathan Power

LONDON (JP): Sanctions do work. Perhaps too well and with a vengeance. Saddam Hussein's rush to point his troops at Kuwait was the stratagem of a very desperate man, who understands he is almost at the moment of checkmate. But this is the time when everyone else has to keep their mental balance and make the shrewd two or three moves that will end the game.

Sanctions have achieved far more than the Gulf War. They have led to the dismemberment of Iraq's nuclear, chemical, biological and long-range missile capability. They have destroyed the modern sector of Iraq's economy. They have led to the first serious internal challenges to Saddam's absolute power. They have, too, led to a sharp rise in the infant mortality rate and a chronic shortage of basic surgical materials in the hospitals. They have cut huge swathes through the well-being of ordinary folk. Only two weeks ago, Saddam was compelled to reduce the basic ration of rice, wheat, tea and sugar by a half.

It would be even worse if UN sanctions policy did not allow food and humanitarian aid to vulnerable groups. And it would be even better if Saddam's pride wouldn't forbid him clinching a deal the UN have long offered, to allow him to sell some of his oil to pay for more of this humanitarian aid.

Nevertheless, all in all, the sanctions wheel has ground exceedingly small and, despite the smuggling through Jordan and Turkey, Iraq has been deprived of the most important essentials of the modern economy.

By the middle of this week it was obvious to everyone that Saddam's joust towards the Kuwaiti frontier was just a ploy. Given the nature of his hollowed-out military establishment, one can only assume it was designed more for effect than for action. Presumably, in his own peculiar, unpredictable, irrational way, Saddam thought by raising the stakes he would put the lifting of sanctions back on the front burner of world opinion and away from the cool deliberations of the UN Security Council.

Wrapped in the cocoon of his own warped personality and reassured by his sycophantic advisors he has clearly miscalculated again. If Washington and London were ever open to argument about easing sanctions this move has surely closed the door. Not even Moscow or Paris, who have been pushing for a loosening of sanctions, are going to waste time on taking Saddam's part if this is his way of trying to speed up the deliberations.

But what to do next? Before Saddam's military mobilization there was in train a serious debate on the easing of sanctions. Rolf Ekeus, the diligent Swedish chairman of the UN's special disarmament commission, reported to the Security Council Thursday that the defanging of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the factories that produced them is complete, and the monitoring equipment to make sure that Iraq doesn't engage in a new clandestine program is in place.

If this report had been made, as it should have been, in an uneventful way, sandwiched in between discussions on Haiti, Bosnia, Rwanda, Angola, Somalia and Tajikistan, then there would have been pressure on the Security Council hard-liners, the U.S. and Britain, to bend a little on continuing sanctions, as long as Saddam agreed on recognizing Kuwait and its borders and on paying out reparations with its new oil money. America and Britain, alone on insisting on the removal of Saddam Hussein before sanctions were lifted, would have felt some heat.

No longer and rightly so. Saddam has made it crystal clear he cannot be trusted with any deal. While parole was being discussed, he decided to stage a break-out. The sentence cannot now be commuted. Sanctions must continue.

The only trouble with that is there is no mandate for them to. Nor for the U.S. and Britain, as they appear to be, demanding that Iraq remove all the armed forces from within easy reach of Kuwait.

This needs to be rectified at once. The Security Council needs to equip itself with more extensive powers than Resolution 687, the cease-fire resolution, mistakenly labeled by insiders as the "mother of all resolutions."

Reasonable people may argue about whether Saddam should be blasted away or sanctioned to death -- I clearly prefer the latter. But on the question of tightening the screws, it's difficult to see if there are any grounds for further debate.