Global Policy Forum

By Dilip Hiro

One year after the Anglo-American bombing of lraq during Operation Desert Fox the international spotlight has moved on, but US and British bombs continue to fall on targets in the nofly zones of northern and southern Iraq. In the latest instance, on December 6, thirty "hostile formations" flew over southern Iraq and attacked "Iraqi service and civilian institutions," according to the Iraqi News Agency. But Iraqs "brave ground defenses" intercepted these formations and forced them to flee.

The no-fly zones cover 60 percent of Iraq and extend to the southern suburbs of Baghdad. Nevertheless, in mid-August British and US aircraft hit Iraqi targets outside these sectors. This led France, still basking in the glory of its participation in the US-led NATO campaign in Kosovo, to protest loudly. It worked-the US-British alliance quietly returned to the original parameters of its operation. To cover its embarrassment, the Pentagon announced that over the past eight months the US and British air forces had fired more than 1,000 missiles at 359 Iraqi targets-more than three times the number of attacks made during Desert Fox. That there is no UN resolution authorizing the no-fly zones seems not to bother the Clinton Administration.

In May Britain and the Netherlands jointly prepared a UN Security Council draft resolution to disarm Iraq of its conventional weapons. The draft, which received US support, proposed the creation of a UN Commission for Inspection and Monitoring and demanded that Iraq give its teams "immediate, unconditional and unrestricted access to any and all areas, facilities, records and means of transportation they may wish to inspect." In return, the UN ban on Iraqi oil exports would be lifted, under strict financial controls, for 100 days at a time.

Rejecting the draft, Baghdad said it would allow UN inspectors only if all sanctions were lifted unconditionally and only for nonintrusive monitoring. Its position remains unchanged. "We say we cannot tolerate the impact of the sanctions and spies at the same time," said an editorial in Al Thawra ("The Revolution"), the newspaper of the ruling Baath Socialist Party, on November 26. "But the unjust sanctions ... are much easier to accept than the presence of spies and their recurrent and concocted crises aiming to prolong sanctions."

The Anglo-Dutch draft soon met competition from one produced by Russia and backed by China that called for an end to all sanctions and for, a less intrusive system of inspection and monitoring. Months of haggling have yet to produce any compromise. The statement by British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook that a resolution with unanimous support would be on the Security Council table by mid-December proved overly optimistic. The promised document was indeed produced on December 11, but at France's instigation, the council's current president, Britain's Jeremy Greenstock, postponed the vote. The Anglo-Americans hope,that once the December 19 Russian parliamentary poll is out of the way Moscow might prove more pliable.

Differences between the United States and Russia have also emerged around the Security Council's renewal of the UN's $5.26 billion oil-for-food program for Iraq. Among other things, Moscow proposed that the cash limit on Iraqs petroleum exports be removed. Washington disagreed. With no compromise in sight before the November 20 deadline, the Council extended the current scheme by two weeks, hoping that would spur the competing sides to hammer out a compromise. But Saddam Hussein had different ideas. Instead of accepting the extension, he turned off the oil taps on November 20. The next day, the London Brent oil futures hit $25.90 a barrel (West Texas crude rose to $26.78 a barrel), the highest price since the Gulf War. Saddam then rejected another one-week extension granted by the council, forcing it to opt for the regular six-monthly renewal of the scheme, which he accepted.

While the diplomatic tussle at the UN shows little sign of ending, the Iraqi people continue to suffer. "Don't play the battle on the backs of the civilian population by letting them wait until the more complex issues [of the UN inspections] are resolved," said Hans von Sponeck, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, on the eve of the General Assembly session in September. "Please remove the humanitarian discussions from the rest in order to really end a silent human tragedy." Iraq has not only experienced an alarming increase in infant mortality but a whole generation of young people is growing up with impaired intelligence because of lack of protein during infancy. According to the latest UNICEF report, the mortality rate among Iraqi children under 5 rose from 56 per thousand in 1984-89 to 131 in 1994-99 as a result of an increase in malnutrition and disease, and the dearth of medicine after the embargo precipitated the collapse of the national economy. That means some 500,000 children have died as a result of the sanctions.

In late October von Sponeck again called for de-linking the humanitarian and disarmament issues. This annoyed Washington and London, which tried to block his reappointment by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan. But Annan extended von Sponeck's term for a year, partly because he holds similar views and partly because failure to reappoint him would have upset the remaining three Security Council members. The decline in their diplomatic leverage is the price Washington and London must pay for the bombs they began dropping on Iraq a year ago.