Bush May Permit Iraqi Sale of Oil for Food, Medicine

President Bush vowed Tuesday not to permit “the suffering of innocent women and children” in war-ravaged Iraq, and the White House said it is considering the possibility of allowing the country to sell oil to buy food and medicine.

The possible oil sales, urged by the head of a special United Nations commission, would loosen a postwar U.S. policy that has kept an economic noose around Iraq while insisting that Saddam Hussein’s government can afford to buy the relief supplies it needs.

In acknowledging that the Administration is now contemplating easing that stranglehold, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater repeated charges that Baghdad may have the means to provide for its citizens without oil sales.

But faced with warnings of an impending human crisis in the defeated country, the President and his aides indicated a new flexibility that suggests they do not want the United States to be seen as standing idle in the face of starvation and disease.

“We’re under pressure by having to deal with a very human situation,” Fitzwater conceded at a White House briefing.

Bush, discussing the situation in Iraq after a telephone conversation with Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, a special U.N. envoy who has warned of a worsening situation for Iraqi civilians, said that he had not yet decided whether a change of policy will be necessary.

But asked about Iraq at the start of a morning Cabinet meeting, he pledged: “The United States is not going to see suffering of innocent women and children.”

In the closed session that followed, Bush shifted focus to present in some opening comments what his spokesman called “an impassioned speech” in support of Robert M. Gates, his embattled choice to head the CIA.

The Gates nomination has run into unexpected trouble in the face of questions about the official’s role in the Iran-Contra affair. But Bush was said to have taken pains to express to the Cabinet his “personal outrage” at efforts to “denigrate” his nominee by “leaks and innuendo.”

Fitzwater later took pains to stress that the Administration continues to oppose any lifting of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations against Iraq almost a year ago, despite proposals by some to end the restrictions on humanitarian grounds.

Instead, he stressed, the plan under consideration would merely allow Iraq to sell oil to raise money to buy food and medicine while the sanctions remain in place. A U.N. committee that administers the sanctions on Iraq is expected to consider such a proposal as early as today.

While the sanctions prohibit Iraq from selling its oil, they permit it to receive humanitarian shipments of food and medicine. But reports from a wide range of independent medical experts, U.N. officials and others have described widespread shortages of emergency goods.

The debate over sanctions policy comes at an unstable time in U.S. relations with Iraq, which faces a U.N.-imposed deadline of Thursday to provide a final inventory of its nuclear sites.

The United States has threatened to take military action against Iraq if it does not comply with the demand, and officials reiterated Tuesday that the Administration remains far from satisfied with Iraq’s revelations to date. “They have a bad record of performance,” Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said. “They get a failing grade on every single category.”

But Administration officials Tuesday did not repeat the earlier threats of possible military action and noted pointedly that Thursday’s deadline had been imposed by the United Nations, not by the United States. At the same time, Fitzwater said that the Administration saw no link between any Iraqi cooperation on the nuclear question and its own decision on whether to ease the sanctions.

Nevertheless, the sanctions review itself raises awkward questions for an Administration whose rigid approach to Iraq has shown no sign of achieving its principal objective of driving Hussein from power.

That rigidity has met with resistance from other U.N. members, some of whom have endorsed the plan to authorize oil sales as the only realistic means to persuade Iraq to pay for war reparations and weapons dismantlement programs ordered by the United Nations.

At the same time, however, the prospect of any easing that would provide Iraq with a new source of income has prompted vigorous objections from Administration officials who are skeptical of prospects for maintaining control over the funds.

“It’s very hard to control the flow of cash once they start to sell oil,” said Williams, expressing what he acknowledged are “serious reservations” on the part of the Pentagon to any easing of the sanctions on Iraq.

BACKGROUND

Petroleum exports have been by far Iraq’s most important source of revenue, providing more than 95% of its foreign exchange earnings in recent years. With the second-largest oil reserves in the Middle East, Iraq had steadily boosted production and export capacity. Exports peaked in 1980 at about 3.4 million barrels daily before declining during the Iran-Iraq War, which ended in 1988. When it invaded Kuwait a year ago, Iraq was exporting about 3 million barrels a day. The worldwide embargo imposed by the United Nations on Aug. 6, four days after the invasion, effectively closed off the country’s oil trade.