Global Policy Forum

The UN Security Council has given itself until the beginning of July to decide what should and should not be exported to Iraq under new sanctions arrangements. America and Britain, the sponsors of these proposed sanctions, wanted them to come into effect on June 2nd, at the end of the old oil-for-food formula's last six-monthly period. But they failed to bring the council into line in time, so the old formula, which allows Iraq to buy only humanitarian goods, was renewed for a month. This abbreviated renewal led the Iraq government, which demands an end to all sanctions but particularly detests the American-British proposals, to halt its oil exports amid talk of yet another "confrontation".

The New York debate is not over the principle of the new sanctions: America and Britain have already won that argument. The sanctions are called "smart" because the idea behind them is to make it easier for Iraq to import the things its people need, and harder for its government to smuggle in the things that most of the rest of the world does not want it to have. This is fine in theory but hard in practice, since what the Iraqi people most need, no less than the food and medicine they are already getting, are the tools to lift their country out of the stone-age to which it has been banished by 11 years of sanctions. And most of these tools come into the tricky dual-use category of goods that could, conceivably, be dangerous.

Hence the dispute over a list of things that will not be exactly banned but will be subject to review by UN monitoring committees. America and Britain propose a list that is as wide as it is long, drawing suspected items from a previous UN list and from an amplified form of the Wassenaar Arrangement (an export-control instrument, supported by 33 countries, including Russia, which succeeded the cold-war Cocom mechanism for preventing the export of sensitive stuff to communist countries).

France, which took a lead in the early days of the council's discussions, seems to have largely shrugged off the whole intractable business. But Russia is still arguing hard to have the list narrowed, and made as specific as possible. The debate became so tense at one point that the British delegate tried to lighten the atmosphere by introducing a cheerful five-minute musical interlude--a diversion that was stopped this week when the Tunisian delegate objected to its lack of seriousness.

If the sprawling American list remains as it is, and if the review committee says no to the numerous categories on it, Iraq will have little chance of rebuilding its collapsed infrastructure, and its people will remain beggared. The difference between the new scheme, which is meant to allow Iraq to import everything that is not dangerous, and the old one, which allowed imports of only obviously harmless stuff, would disappear. The public-relations exercise behind the proposals, whereby the blame for Iraqi suffering is meant to be shifted from sanctions to Saddam Hussein's regime, would be unconvincing.