July 21, 2000
Saddam Hussein rules as strong as ever in Baghdad 10 years after his invasion of Kuwait, outlasting most of the US-led coalition leaders who evicted Iraq's occupation forces.
With no lifting of the decade-old UN embargo in sight, the Iraqi president continues to defy the West and insist that Baghdad will finish up by "conquering its enemies." "Iraq will regain its pride and re-establish itself," a defiant Saddam told the nation in a July 17 speech marking the revolution that brought his Baath party to power 32 years ago.
A Western diplomat in Baghdad agreed that "in spite of 10 years of sanctions, the Iraqi regime remains strong and is holding up well".
The stated ambition of the US administration to help engineer a change of government in Baghdad now "seems more a psychological and media war than anything else," the diplomat said. "The Americans know that regimes are not toppled by air raids," he said of the strikes on Iraq by US and British planes since 1990.
Saddam invaded Kuwait at dawn on August 2, 1990, and annexed it as Iraq's 19th province. The oil-rich emirate was liberated in February 1991 by an international coalition headed by the United States. The leaders of the anti-Iraq coalition countries who hoped to oust Saddam from power have all since disappeared from the international scene.
Former US president George Bush and then-British prime minister John Major have both stepped down, while the French president at the time, Francois Mitterrand, has died. Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, the chief rival of Saddam in the Arab world, died in June while Saudi King Fahd has been ailing for the past five years.
Four days after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the UN Security Council imposed a crippling embargo on Baghdad that is tied to the elimination of Saddam's once prized weapons of mass destruction. But since the four-day air blitz by US and British planes in December 1998, Iraq has been free from UN arms inspectors and rejects a UN resolution linking a suspension of the embargo to a new weapons inspection regime. Over the past four years, Iraq has been authorised to sell crude under the strictly supervised "oil-for-food" programme to buy essential goods.
But the sanctions, on UN humanitarian officials' own testimony, have missed their target by punishing the 22-million population rather than the Iraqi leadership.
"Sanctions have completely failed in a dictatorship environment," said the former UN humanitarian aid coordinator to Iraq, Hans von Sponeck. Von Sponeck, who resigned in February to protest at the continuing sanctions, said there existed a "refrigerator generation" of young Iraqis who had grown up under sanctions. "We'll never be able to give them back what they lost all these years," he said.
The health ministry said July 15 that a total of 1.36 million Iraqis, mostly children and the elderly, had died up until the end of June because of a lack of health care and food due to the embargo.
On the political front, another diplomat noted that the Iraqi leadership, although isolated internationally, has made headway in mending fences with its Gulf neighbours, except for Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. "The presence in Baghdad of embassies of four Gulf countries -- Bahrain, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates -- clearly shows that the boycott is crumbling," he said.
According to Iraq's former ambassador to France, Abdel Razzak Hashemi, "Saddam Hussein's regime is solid enough to face up to the challenges for several years to come." Hashemi ridiculed the "so-called opposition-in-exile" which has been unable to overcome its rifts despite political and financial support from the United States.
