BY MEGAN ARNEY
The United Nations Security Council voted December 4 to continue to allow the Iraqi government to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months to pay "war reparations" and purchase a limited amount of food and medicine. This arrangement was established last year, within the framework of sanctions that were first imposed on Baghdad by the UN Security Council in 1990 at Washington's insistence.

Baghdad immediately responded to the UN Security Council's decision by announcing that it would neither pump nor sell any more oil until there is agreement on a new distribution plan for food and medicine. The Iraqi government also closed its oil pipeline to Turkey December 5, saying it would not be reopened until the United Nations approved a plan to increase the amount of oil Baghdad could sell. "Iraq does not accept the continuation of this situation, which is unbalanced and forced by the United States on the Security Council by pressure, blackmail, and lies," an Iraqi government spokesman told the Associated Press December 5. Both Paris and Moscow favor easing the sanctions in order to expand their business in Iraq, while Washington has insisted on keeping them as tight as possible.

The Iraqi government on December 5 also reiterated its refusal to allow the UN "weapons inspectors" into dozens of government buildings, presidential compounds, and military sites, and again demanded a timetable on ending the inspections and replacing U.S.-piloted U2 spy planes that fly over Iraqi airspace with planes from another country.

Secretary of Defense William Cohen and British defense secretary George Robertson immediately called a press conference to respond to Baghdad. Cohen said, "We would not rule out any military action," while Robertson added that the British aircraft carrier the Invincible would join the U.S. naval and air armada in the Persian Gulf. Washington has some 20,000 troops are stationed in the region, two aircraft carriers with more than 50 warplanes each, and a dozen warships that are capable of firing Tomahawk missiles deep into Iraq.

A few days later, Cohen postponed a trip to the Mideast December 9, claiming that worries over tensions with Baghdad and in Bosnia kept him from leaving the U.S. capital. Noting the massive buildup of U.S. air and naval forces in the Gulf, Cohen declared that the situation "can't go on indefinitely without being resolved," and warned that any U.S. military assault on Iraq would not be "pinpricks."

Deadly impact of U.S.-led sanctions
After failing in its most recent attempt to launch a war against Iraq, Washington is now using the sanctions, UN weapons "inspectors," and the oil deal to keep pressure on Baghdad in its goal to overturn the regime there and establish a government more subservient to imperialist interests.

The Clinton administration and other bourgeois spokespeople have attempted to shift the blame for more than a million deaths caused by the UN sanctions onto the Iraqi regime. In his December 9 New York Times column, A.M Rosenthal piped, "For seven years Saddam Hussein has murdered Iraqi children, thousands. He refuses to provide the foreign food and medicine they must have... The talk at the UN became not how to punish him for that crime but how to ease the sanctions that so far have prevented him from regaining full military power."

But a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) report issued in late November gave a glimpse of the impact that the U.S.-led sanctions have had on the Iraqi people. The report stated that 32 percent of children under five, some 960,000, are chronically malnourished - a rise of 72 percent since 1991. Around 23 percent are underweight - twice as many as in neighboring Jordan or Turkey. UNICEF surveys also found that in rural areas only 50 percent of people have access to water, and only 34 percent have sanitation. Since the sanctions were imposed on Iraq there has been a six-fold increase in infant mortality, according to the World Health Organization.

On top of these figures, scientific studies by international researchers have found that Washington used banned weapons and ammunition with uranium against Iraq in 1990 - 91, exposing Iraqi land to contamination by toxic chemicals making it impossible to cultivate.

The recent UNICEF report concluded "that there has been no consistent evidence for improvement in nutritional status" in children under five "since the start of SCR986/1111 implementation," that is, the UN Security Council agreement a year ago to allow the sale of small amounts of Iraqi oil.

And despite this arrangement, which came after more than six years of a total ban on oil sales, Iraq receives only 25 percent of the medicine it needs and none of the materials needed for agriculture, water, spare parts of electrical power stations, and education.  
 
 
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