Iraq Conciliatory, Looks for Relief : Diplomacy: Baghdad’s prime minister pledges to cooperate with U.N.’s nuclear inquiry.

The Iraqi regime launched a political and diplomatic campaign Monday that sounded like a plea for relief from the effects of economic sanctions and from the threat of renewed U.S. air attacks on its military installations.

Prime Minister Sadoun Hammadi, in a news conference, pledged his country’s full cooperation with U.N. demands for disclosure and destruction of Iraq’s nuclear capability and pledged also that if economic sanctions are eased, Iraq will use the money for food and medicine and not weaponry.

Hammadi, an economist appointed after the Persian Gulf War to Iraq’s second-highest office by Saddam Hussein--who remains in total control of governmental power--said Baghdad would “implement in letter and in spirit” the U.N. resolution calling for destruction of Iraq’s nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.

The United Nations and the United States have accused Iraq of evading the demands of U.N. resolutions and of frustrating the efforts of U.N. commissions sent to Iraq to inspect nuclear facilities. Gradually, the Iraqi authorities have made information available, but in the words of one U.N. inspector, the process “is like extracting teeth.”

Meanwhile, Iraq has put its armed forces on alert, according to diplomats here, and called on Arab countries to protest U.S. threats of military action.

And Hammadi did not dismiss the possibility of U.S. and allied air attacks on a recalcitrant Iraq. In answers to questions, he appeared to see renewed war--and renewed defeat for Iraq--as a probability. “Iraq’s military capability as compared to the United States is very well known,” he said.

Yet the tone of the prime minister’s remarks was conciliatory, aimed at obtaining an easing if not a complete lifting of economic sanctions that have closed Iraq to most world trade since its invasion of Kuwait last Aug. 2.

One proposal that would unblock about $5 billion in Iraqi bank accounts in the United States, Europe and Japan was endorsed recently by a U.N. commission as a way to avert starvation in Iraq.

There are reports that this year’s harvest is bad. In any event, Iraq--despite its potential as a rich agricultural producer--imports two-thirds of its food.

Hammadi, who holds a graduate degree in economics from the University of Wisconsin, estimated that Iraq will need $3 billion this year to buy food, medicine and agricultural chemicals.

He assured reporters at Monday’s news conference that if Iraq got relief from sanctions, the money would be used for humanitarian purposes.

The tone of Hammadi’s remarks seemed at times almost pleading, and there was a general absence of what many have called a traditional Iraqi boasting and bluster. All this, according to sources here, reflected the troubled state of the country’s economy and people in the wake of the Gulf War and the long 1980-88 war with Iran.

Iraq has released no casualty figures for the Gulf War, but estimates by foreign experts here put the dead and wounded at between 50,000 and 70,000, plus fewer than 15,000 civilian casualties. But statistics understate the real effects on Iraq’s people. Diplomats in Baghdad speak of a breakdown of morale and morality.

“Kuwait gave them a taste for theft,” one said. “And now there is car stealing and breaking and entering.” Houses in prosperous neighborhoods of the capital suffer waves of burglaries. And there is a rise in prostitution among young women.

Real economic hardship, to some extent, can be found beneath the surface. The economy looks better than it is because services have been restored on an emergency basis. Electricity is working at less than one-third of normal capacity, which is enough to light the cities only because industry is not functioning.

People are coping as best they can. Members of the urban middle class, many of whom grew rich by supplying the military and taking part in the construction of modern Baghdad during the 1970s and ‘80s, are selling their carpets and silver to raise cash.

The less well-off have their own methods. Iraq’s ruling Arab Baath Socialist Party government traditionally subsidized food, clothing and other items through special stores for government workers--in an economy where almost every family has at least one member working for the government.

Those stores, which still have some supplies, are now thronged daily with people trying to buy goods that they can sell on the street for 16 times the state price.

Iraq’s military and government elite don’t have to use the ordinary government stores, however. They are allowed to spend Iraqi currency in special hard-currency shops.

Still, the poor are suffering. In a Baghdad hospital a mother cradles a frail child, with an intravenous feeder in his tiny arm. The child is nine months old but weighs only nine pounds. Malnutrition is not yet at crisis level, but it could become so if the economy continues moribund.

And that presents the real problem for economic sanctions, according to diplomats. The United Nations, they say, must find a formula to ease sanctions to help the poor and avoid the charge that the world’s embargo is aimed at hurting the Iraqi people. But at the same time, they add, the United Nations must continue sanctions to force change in Saddam Hussein’s government.