The use of the United Nations to trample on Iraq’s sovereignty is not new. From its creation after World War II, the major imperialist powers have used the UN banner--always in the name of "peace"--to carry out invasions and wars, from the 1950–53 Korean War, to the 1994 invasion of Haiti, to military intervention against Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

In August 1990, the imperialist powers seized on Baghdad’s invasion of Kuwait to begin a rapid march to war. Under the pretext of defending Kuwait’s sovereignty, Washington sought to impose a submissive pro-U.S. regime in Iraq and to edge out its imperialist rivals for dominance in the Mideast. The weaker imperialist powers, particularly London and Paris, aimed to get the biggest piece of the pie possible.

Between August and November 1990, the "permanent" members of the Security Council--the imperialist powers of France, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with the complicity of the ruling bureaucracies of China and the Soviet Union--unanimously pushed through a series of resolutions to legitimize a wide-ranging offensive against Iraq.

Barely four days after Saddam Hussein’s regime invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, the Security Council imposed a total economic embargo on Iraq. Washington’s naval blockade against that country was immediately endorsed by the council. Three months later the council issued a January 15 deadline authorizing the use of "all necessary means" against Iraq.

Revolutionary Cuba, one of the 10 governments serving a two-year rotating stint on the Security Council at the time, was alone in condemning the imperialist moves toward war against Iraq. The UN deliberations, Cuban ambassador Ricardo Alarcón pointed out, will "be used as part of the designs of the United States to intensify its intervention in a part of the world that it appears to regard as its own property."

Cuba refused to vote for the economic embargo and naval blockade on Iraq that was approved by the Security Council. Instead, it proposed an amendment exempting food and medicine from the sanctions, in a motion stating that "access to basic foodstuffs and to adequate medical assistance is a fundamental human right." China, Cuba, and Yemen voted for the amendment, while the governments of Britain, France, Canada, Finland, and the United States voted "no."

On Jan. 16, 1991, the U.S. and British armed forces led a six-week bombing campaign against Baghdad and other targets in Iraq. Washington and its allies destroyed factories, bridges, electrical generation plants, irrigation works, and water purification facilities.

As many as 150,000 Iraqis were slaughtered in this assault. In the final 48 hours of the invasion, U.S. forces carried out a massacre of Iraqi civilians and retreating soldiers on the road from Kuwait to the port city of Basra in southern Iraq.  
 
‘Means of life support destroyed’
Seventeen days after Baghdad’s official surrender on March 3, a UN-sponsored fact-finding commission released a report on the conditions facing Iraq after the invasion. Nothing had "prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country," wrote UN undersecretary general Martti Ahtisaari, who headed the commission. "Most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous," he wrote, in "what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society."

As part of the conditions for a cease-fire, the UN Security Council passed a raft of resolutions that institutionalized the imperialist powers’ assault on Iraqi sovereignty. It kept the sanctions in place and decreed that Iraq must "unconditionally" destroy all kinds of weapons "under international supervision," allowing "on-site inspection of any locations in Iraq" as decided by the Security Council. The conditions were broad enough to give Washington and its allies plenty of pretexts for military intervention in the name of "enforcing the UN resolutions."

The UN-sanctioned economic embargo has had devastating effects on Iraq over the past 12 years. By 1993, noted an article in the October 2002 Middle East Report (MERIP), the "Iraqi economy under sanctions stood at one-fifth its size in 1979, and then took a further nose dive in 1994." It reported that the extensive infrastuctural damage inflicted by the 1991 bombing had compromised "the provision of clean water, sanitation and electrical power to the Iraqi population.

"The resulting public health emergency, rather than hunger, has been and continues to be the primary cause of increased mortality, especially among children under five," the MERIP article continued.

The Global Policy Forum, a UN-associated body, estimates that "at least 400,000 of these young children have died due to the sanctions."

Nonetheless, Washington has insisted on maintaining the embargo. Madeleine Albright, U.S. secretary of state in the Clinton administration, insisted in 1997 that Washington would back sanctions "as long as it takes" to usher in a "successor regime" to Saddam Hussein.

Like a band of thieves who fight over the spoils, however, the seemingly united "coalition" of imperialist governments that carried out the 1990–91 war on Iraq began to visibly fray by the mid-1990s. Paris, whose influence in the Mideast had been dealt a blow by Washington through the Gulf war, attempted to compensate for this situation by expanding its trade with Iraq.

The government of the Russian workers state, economically battered, also saw advantages in trading with Iraq.

The French and Russian governments made proposals to ease or even lift the sanctions. In response to these pressures, Washington and London moved to establish what is known as the "oil for food policy," implemented with Security Council backing in 1995 and 1996.

The program permits Iraq to sell specified amounts of oil during a six-month period. Held in a UN-controlled account, the proceeds are used to fill orders for "humanitarian" goods that UN officials sign off on. Until last year, a committee of all Security Council members supervised the operation of this program.

London and especially Washington have regularly placed "holds" on large orders--for example, some $5.3 billion worth in early 2002--claiming that requested items might be suitable for military as well as civilian use. "Politically motivated blocks and ‘holds,’" commented the Global Policy Forum, have meant "there has been little repair and renewal of Iraq’s badly-deteriorated infrastructure."

According to the Middle East Report article, the oil-for-food scheme has "brought commodities into Iraq, rather than restoring Iraqis’ purchasing power or the country’s infrastructure to anything approaching pre-war levels.... Systems of public transportation, water, sanitation and electricity remain in a precarious state, the last two imperiled further by several years of drought."

French imperialism has profited from the UN-sponsored sanctions regime. During what MERIP calls "the sanctions decade," Baghdad signed a number of contracts with companies in France, as well as enterprises and government agencies in Russia and China. From 1997 to 2001 the three countries garnered nearly $5.5 billion of the $18.29 billion in contracts in the oil industry for exploration, maintenance, construction, and in other sectors.

French companies have signed 798 contracts for parts and equipment for the oil industry, second only to Russia, which has gathered 862 contracts. Capitalists in France have negotiated unsigned agreements to exploit the Majnoon and Nahr bin Umar fields.

In June 2001, Paris and Moscow proposed the removal of restrictions on foreign investments in Iraq’s oil industry, only to meet opposition from Washington and London. As of September of 2002, Iraq was pumping oil at less than half its capacity, owing both to a pricing dispute with the Security Council under the oil-for-food program and to the industry’s deteriorating infrastructure, a casualty of the imperialist embargo.  
 
‘No-fly zones’ and UN divisions
As they strangled Iraq’s economy with an embargo, the imperialists also suspended Iraq’s territorial sovereignty. Washington, London, and Paris began to enforce a "no-fly zone" in northern Iraq in 1991, and one in southern Iraq the following year. While the Security Council resolutions do not specifically call for "no-fly zones," they are sufficiently vague to allow Washington to interpret them as authorizing such measures.

Ostensibly designed to protect two oppressed groups, the Kurds in the north and the Shi’ite population in the south, from repression, the exclusion zones--covering more than half of Iraq’s territory--have provided the imperialist rulers with a pretext for bombing Iraqi defense facilities and sowing terror in civilian areas.

In 1996 French planes stopped joining their U.S. and British counterparts in the patrols and attacks in the north. Two years later they withdrew from the military patrols over the south, as Paris distanced itself from the U.S.-British bombing of Iraq in 1998.

Meanwhile, the U.S. and British planes have continued their bombing raids over the north and south of Iraq. According to the British Ministry of Defense, the average monthly release of bombs rose to five tons by mid-2000. Washington and London have picked up the intensity of their attacks since the second half of last year.

At first supposedly limited to attacking only Iraqi antiaircraft emplacements that fired on them, British and U.S. forces have steadily broadened their official range of targets to include major air defense installations and other military targets.

Combined with the ban on Iraqi imports of military equipment and the overall effect of the sanctions on the country’s economy, the bombing raids have helped to greatly weaken Iraq’s defensive military capacities.  
 
Provocative role of ‘UN inspectors’
In 1991, in the name of "verifying" Iraq’s compliance with a UN resolution forbidding it from holding biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons as well as missiles of a certain range, the imperialist governments organized teams of "weapons inspectors" to snoop around Iraq. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) program was established to supervise these provocative teams that went around demanding access to any Iraqi facilities they wanted to investigate. Inspections by UNSCOM and the International Atomic Energy Agency, also a UN body, continued for the next seven years.

The leader of one New Zealand military contingent in the inspection teams, Major David Le Page, told the New Zealand Herald last September that the inspectors were not popular among Iraqis. "When you cross the road," he said, "people would throw rocks at you, spit at you, and even try to run you down with their cars."

The Iraqi government destroyed numerous military facilities at the demand of the "inspectors." Nonetheless, Washington and London were never satisfied. In December 1998, U.S. and British forces launched four days of intensive bombing and missile attacks on alleged sites of development and construction of "weapons of mass destruction."

The offensive, dubbed Desert Fox, followed the withdrawal of UN weapons "inspectors," although it did not receive Security Council endorsement because of objections by Paris and Moscow.  
 
UN ‘inspectors’ withdraw from Iraq
By 1998, disputes over the activities of the "inspectors" grew increasingly frequent and sharp. Baghdad officially suspended cooperation with the UN units twice, in January and October of that year, before their withdrawal in December.

In January 1999, in face of public debate over the role of the inspectors, officials in Washington acknowledged that U.S. spies had been part of the inspection teams. According to the Middle East Report, "revelations of intelligence gathering" included a statement by UNSCOM head Rolf Ekeus on Swedish radio in July 2002 that U.S. inspectors had "sought information outside the organization’s mandate, such as details on the movements of Saddam Hussein."

The so-called inspections resumed in November of last year, this time under the UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC). They assumed the "right" to enter any area and declare it a "no-drive, no-fly zone." Reports by chief inspector Hans Blix, a Swedish official, have been used by both Washington and London on the one side, and Paris, Berlin, Moscow, and Beijing on the other, as ammunition in their debates.

While today the competing interests of Washington, London, Paris, and other powers are more visible than a decade ago, these imperialist powers continue to use the United Nations to advance their respective predatory interests and to seek to fool working people into viewing it as a vehicle for "peace."  
 
 
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