Global Policy Forum

By Edith M. Lederer

With help from Russia, France and the Arab world, Iraq has ended a de facto air travel embargo. Now it's chipping away at 10 -year-old U.N. economic sanctions and seeking more control over its oil riches.

Baghdad's high-profile campaign to end its long diplomatic isolation appears to be gaining momentum. Long-closed borders with Jordan and Saudi Arabia are opening up to U.N.-approved goods. Dozens of businessmen, officials, scientists, artists and athletes have traveled to Iraq for the first time since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Baghdad demanded -and is getting -payment for oil sales in euros instead U.S. dollars, the hated currency of an enemy state. "They've stuck a little bit more of a wedge in the door to get it open," said Terence Taylor, assistant director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London.

The response from the United States, which is publicly committed to ousting strongman Saddam Hussein, has been muted -something diplomats and analysts have attributed to a lack of desire in the Clinton administration to create an Iraq crisis during the presidential campaign. But they don't expect changes in the wake of the election. That's mainly because Washington's hard-line strategy to isolate and punish Iraq has almost no support at the United Nations and has been undermined by events on the ground, said David Malone, president of the International Peace Academy, a New York think tank.

Despite cracks in the sanctions regime, the United Nations still controls the billions of dollars in revenue from legal Iraqi oil sales -and will until Iraq lets U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country and they declare that its nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs have been dismantled. The Security Council imposed economic sanctions to punish Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait and to ensure it cannot wage war with weapons of mass destruction. Iraq maintains its weapons programs have been eliminated and wants sanctions lifted immediately. It has barred U.N. weapons inspectors who left Baghdad in 1998 from returning.

With a new team of inspectors trained and ready to go to Iraq, U.N Secretary-General Kofi Annan has urged Baghdad to cooperate. "The Iraqi leadership will achieve more through cooperation with the international community ... than through confrontation," Annan said Sunday at a summit of the 56 -nation Organization of the Islamic Conference, where Arab support for Iraq was evident.

Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf said after meeting Annan on Monday that Baghdad would hold talks "without preconditions ... to reach a comprehensive and final solution to the siege imposed on Iraq."

But Taylor said Iraq is unlikely to allow inspectors back in because it is benefitting from the erosion of sanctions and increasing international recognition "without having to concede anything with regard to their weapons programs." "The regime appears to be engaged in 'regime survival,' and they have enough resources to do that without lifting sanctions," he said. "It's benefitted greatly by high oil prices, gains in the spot market, and illegal oil sales, so it is not short of funds."

Taylor and others believe Iraq has skillfully divided the Security Council, especially the five veto-wielding permanent members. Russia and France have been in the forefront of promoting travel to Iraq. Regular international passenger service has not resumed, but U.S. adherence to the 10 -year-old de facto travel ban is supported only by Britain.

Previously, 30 percent of Iraq's oil revenue went to pay victims of Baghdad's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. But Russia in June objected to a $15.9 billion award to the Kuwait Petroleum Co., and France then spearheaded a compromise that cut the amount earmarked for Kuwait to 25 percent. Now Iraq is pressing for more power to contest awards to victims of the Kuwaiti invasion and demanding the United Nations set aside money from every barrel of oil sold to help maintain its own oil industry.

"The Europeans have successfully maneuvered Washington into a box on Iraq," said Charles Duelfer, who was deputy director of the former U.N. weapons inspection agency and is now a scholar at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. A number of countries outside the United States have "an increasing stake in retaining the current regime" in Iraq for economic and other reasons, Duelfer said. "So we're facing a point where there's going to be some serious friction between Washington and other capitals," he said. "Whatever new administration comes in will have to think about that."