Don’t Be Fooled by Baghdad Again : U.S. intelligence findings should give U.N. Security Council reason for pause

The United States has been waging a vigorous diplomatic battle to keep the U.N. Security Council from backsliding on the issue of economic sanctions on Iraq, and American officials are now confident they have a majority of the 15-member council with them. If not, says U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright, Washington is ready to cast a rare veto to stop the sanctions from being weakened. Such a step would be fully justified.

The unarguable fact is that Saddam Hussein’s regime has yet to show that it is indeed ready to live in peace with its neighbors and with Iraq’s own restive population.

For example, Iraq was required by U.N. resolutions growing out of its invasion of Kuwait to destroy all of its unconventional weapons of mass destruction and the means for producing them. U.N. inspectors, with good intelligence in hand to overcome Iraqi deception and dissimulation, now think that Iraq’s nuclear and chemical warfare programs have been identified and that the weapons and means for producing them have been destroyed. At the same time alarming new evidence has surfaced that Iraq continues to hide biological weapons that would allow it to infect populations with plague and cholera.

U.N. commissioner Rolf Ekeus believes that Iraq will soon come clean on its biological weapons program. But the fact that it was able to keep this frightful project a secret for five years again points up the truism that when dealing with Saddam Hussein there simply is no substitute for constant and direct monitoring and verification.

A key means for monitoring and verification are U.S. satellites and the remarkable data they produce. Ambassador Albright has used some of that material to persuade many Security Council members to stand firm on the sanctions issue. Among other things, satellite photos are said to show that Iraq has incorporated large amounts of seized Kuwaiti military equipment into its own armed forces; that it has spent lavishly on palaces for Hussein and other members of the elite, even while proclaiming its poverty and the suffering of its people to the world; and that it may even be trying to rebuild a chemical warfare and missile capacity.

Despite this evidence, Iraq still has sympathizers on the Security Council. France, which on Monday opened a diplomatic interests section in Baghad, is eager for the sanctions to be eased because it can count on large commercial benefits once that happens. Russia, owed billions by Iraq for past weapons deliveries, wants the hard cash that only resumed Iraqi oil sales could make available. None of this diminishes the rightness of what the United States is doing. The sanctions should be eased only when Iraq’s actions show that it’s serious about meeting its responsibilities.