Iraqi Oil Fueling an Old Danger

The longtime seepage in the U.N.-imposed economic blockade of Iraq is threatening to become a flood. American officials and oil industry sources have told The Times that a long-unused pipeline linking Iraq’s Kirkuk oil fields to the Syrian port of Baniyas, was reopened about two months ago and is moving about 150,000 barrels a day to market. Even at the heavily discounted prices Iraq is charging, daily revenues amount to about $2 million, and that’s separate from what Baghdad earns from its U.N.-approved oil sales, whose revenues are earmarked primarily for food and medicine imports.

Income from the illicit pipeline deal goes directly to Saddam Hussein and may well be paying for a revived covert program to build weapons of mass destruction.

International efforts to monitor Iraqi compliance with the U.N. demand that it abandon its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons projects ended in 1998 when Baghdad expelled all U.N. inspectors. Since then it has refused to allow on-the-ground oversight. Except for some briefly resumed bombing of suspected weapons sites by the United States and Britain in late 1998, Iraq has suffered no consequences.

Its legal revenues from approved oil sales have skyrocketed, its sympathizers on the U.N. Security Council--China, France and Russia--have found repeated excuses for inaction, and Arab states have increasingly expressed support for Baghdad’s demand for an end to all sanctions.

The Bush administration took office pledging, as Secretary of State Colin L. Powell put it, to “re-energize” the sanctions policy imposed more than a decade ago during the term of President Bush’s father. But if the new administration has any fresh ideas about how to win over recalcitrants on the Security Council or even mobilize the support of its closest European allies, it is keeping them to itself. For all its tough talk it may find, as the Clinton administration did, that when it comes to Iraq it has the unhappy choice of acting virtually alone or not acting at all.

Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who formerly headed the U.N. inspection commission on Iraq, warns that “it would be absolutely folly” not to assume that Iraq is again working on weapons of mass destruction. “When someone won’t let you witness their innocence, then there’s grounds for suspicion.” Saddam Hussein without terror weapons is an easily containable problem. Saddam Hussein armed with such weapons--as he certainly aims to be--is an international menace.