U.S. Faces Battle Over Sanctions Against Iraq

Now that the four-day military pounding of Iraq is over, a far tougher battle looms for the United States--how to prevent an easing of international sanctions against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

The absence of any hint in the past eight years that the Iraqi leader might buckle under the crippling impact of the U.N.-imposed sanctions has generated disenchantment in Western Europe and Russia and among key states in the Middle East region, such as Turkey, whose own economies have also been dragged down by Iraq’s isolation.

Although disquiet about the effect of sanctions is not new in these countries, the recent U.S.-British airstrikes are certain to rekindle the debate and heighten pressure for change, political analysts on both sides of the Atlantic say.

“Before, we were at odds with Iraq. Now the problem is going to be the allies, and we’ll be in the uncomfortable position of trying to coerce them, rather than Iraq,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a Middle East analyst at the National Defense University in Washington. “What are we going to do, slap sanctions on [countries like] France and Turkey? We certainly can’t bomb them.”

Any move to ease or alter the sanctions would collide with U.S. policy, which still sees them as the most effective way to force Hussein to cooperate with U.N. weapons inspectors seeking to find and destroy his chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities.

“If . . . Iraq chooses to end its cooperation with [the weapons inspectors], then it has literally chosen for sanctions in perpetuity,” Undersecretary of State Thomas R. Pickering warned Tuesday. The sanctions were imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Earlier this week, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz said Baghdad will not allow the inspectors--officially known as the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM--to return.

UNSCOM is the only body that can certify that Iraq is free of weapons of mass destruction. There is now technically no way Iraq can earn its way out of the sanctions.

In Iraq, tensions remained high Tuesday, with authorities complaining that British and U.S. aircraft had violated Iraqi airspace and fired two “stray missiles” that landed near the southern city of Basra. There was no word on damage or injuries in the alleged attack.

U.S. and British defense officials denied that there had been any such incident, which would have marked the first strike since President Clinton halted the air campaign over the weekend.

Iraqi newspapers, meanwhile, continued to portray the confrontation with the United States and Britain as a political victory for Iraq. Al Qadissiya, the newspaper of the Iraqi army, said Baghdad will now be on the diplomatic offensive in order “to achieve our legitimate goal of breaking every shackle imposed by America through the [U.N.] Security Council.”

The opening gambits in the expected debate between the United States and its allies over the Security Council’s sanctions are already visible. French President Jacques Chirac earlier this week floated the idea of a tightly controlled lifting or suspension of sanctions, and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer called for countries “to focus on ways to lift the sanctions and re-integrate Iraq into the community of peace-loving nations.”

“The living conditions of the Iraqi people must be improved,” Fischer said.

The European allies’ motivations are twofold: to benefit commercially and to spur political change in ways that sanctions have not.

While Chirac and Fischer underscored the necessity of keeping any shift on sanctions tightly linked to the goal of dismantling Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, the potential for disagreement with the U.S. is considerable, analysts say.

And with new cracks now showing in the anti-Hussein coalition that seemed so solid only a month ago, the United States could find itself at odds with many of its closest allies on the issue of maintaining tough sanctions.

“The challenge the United States will face is that other countries are fatigued by sanctions,” said Pollack, the National Defense University expert. “They are fed up, and momentum could lead to sanctions-busting.”

Right now, any disagreements over sanctions are masked by another diplomatic skirmish spawned by the airstrikes: the fate of UNSCOM itself and whether the inspection system should be softened in order to win more cooperation from Hussein--an idea floated by Russia and France but seemingly rejected by Pickering on Tuesday.

In comments to reporters, Pickering said the United States is prepared to listen to Russian and French proposals for changing the inspections system, but he underscored American support for UNSCOM in its present form and said that only the inspectors themselves can judge whether such changes might improve the chances of achieving its goal of eliminating Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

At the United Nations, where the Security Council met Tuesday to consider post-strike diplomacy, U.S. delegate Peter Burleigh stressed commitment to the weapons inspectors.

“We admire the work they have done, especially over the last year and a half, under very difficult circumstances,” he said. “That includes the executive chairman, Richard Butler.”

Iraq has branded chief weapons inspector Butler, an Australian, a spy. Russia has called for his resignation. A report by Butler that Iraq was resisting disarmament preceded the recent military strikes.

The Security Council’s review of disarmament and efforts to arrive at a consensus to deal with Iraq are expected to take weeks.

As interim steps, members are expected to receive briefings on the situation in Iraq, including the effects of the bombing, the state of U.N. humanitarian assistance and other topics.

On Tuesday, about 120 U.N. humanitarian workers evacuated during the airstrikes returned to Baghdad from Jordan. They were expected to be back at work today, concentrating on assessing damage from the air attacks.

The workers, who had been evacuated from Baghdad in the midst of the attacks last week, rejoined a skeleton staff of 28 international U.N. humanitarian workers who stayed on throughout the crisis. Butler ordered out the U.N. inspectors before the bombing started last Wednesday.

If Iraq continues to block the inspectors’ return, as most area specialists believe it will, the debate will then shift quickly to sanctions.

Two factors lie at the heart of differences between the U.S. and its European allies over Iraq:

* Europeans, who believe that Communist Eastern Europe collapsed precisely because of its exposure to Western influence, see the lack of movement in Iraq after years of isolation as a confirmation of a failed approach.

“This experience is in the back of our minds,” said Volker Perthes, a Middle East specialist at the Ebenhausen Research Institute for International Affairs, a German government-financed political think tank near Munich. “With the end of the bombing campaign, people have started thinking about alternative forms of sanctions regimes.”

* To at least some degree, nations such as Russia and France, which have a history of strong commercial ties with Baghdad, also want to position themselves for a post-sanctions environment by appearing sympathetic to Iraq’s needs. Clinton administration critics say that one way to counter this tendency is to harden U.S. policy to focus on toppling Hussein, a development that would make nations eager to do business with Iraq in the future and less eager to support the Iraqi dictator now.

“Now people are confused,” said Robert Zoellick, an undersecretary of state in the Bush administration. “They know [the U.S.] will bomb after 14 months of frustration . . . but they don’t know what that means. If the signs were clear that Saddam Hussein was not going to be part of Iraq’s future, then these [nations] will see it’s in their interest to squeeze him.”

Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Baghdad and John J. Goldman at the United Nations contributed to this report.