A Final Warning for Saddam Hussein : Showdown looms on Security Council demand for monitoring of missile testing facilities

Rolf Ekeus, who heads the U.N. commission that is trying to put Iraq out of the mass-destruction weapons business, emphasizes that he is going to Baghdad this week not to negotiate but to deliver a final warning from the Security Council. If Iraq won’t allow U.N. monitoring equipment to be installed at its missile testing facilities, it will invite the “serious consequences” threatened by the council last month. That almost certainly means an attack from the air on the test facilities. Iraq’s government-controlled media are already preparing the populace for such a possibility.

Has President Saddam Hussein calculated that his best political move is to continue to defy the United Nations, whatever the possible cost in bombed military facilities? His line to the world in recent days has been that his regime has complied with nearly all of the requirements set by the Security Council in 1991 in the wake of the Persian Gulf War, and that this cooperation deserves to be rewarded. The question of test site monitoring, which aims to ensure that Iraq sticks to producing only short-range missiles, is presented by Baghdad as an intolerable infringement on its sovereignty. It says it’s willing to discuss the matter but it won’t bow to a dictate. To many Iraqis, but perhaps even more to many Arabs outside Iraq, this no doubt seems reasonable and fair.

The Security Council sees it quite differently. The requirement that Iraq open its weapons facilities to long-term inspections is a direct consequence of Iraq’s aggression in 1990 and the profound suspicion--a conviction, really--that left unmonitored the Baghdad regime would very quickly rebuild its capability to wage aggressive war, again becoming a threat to its neighbors. It is precisely because Iraq has repeatedly demonstrated that it can’t be trusted that its behavior now requires close international scrutiny. This is not something open to compromise, but a matter of basic principle.

However, along with a big stick Ekeus will be carrying a good-sized carrot to Baghdad. Oil sales, Iraq’s chief source of foreign exchange, have been virtually cut off since the war. The United Nations is conditionally willing to allow Iraq to sell up to $1.6 billion worth of oil, provided revenues are used to buy food and medicine and to pay compensation to Iraq’s war victims. Ekeus reportedly will make clear that no oil sales will take place unless Iraq agrees to the monitoring. Here, then, is a possible face-saving way out for Baghdad. It can back down on the monitoring issue and claim in return that it won a major concession on oil sales, opening the way for expanded food imports. But is Saddam Hussein looking for a way out, or for a confrontation? By this weekend, the answer should be clear.