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WASHINGTON, Oct 24: The United States will try again to modify U.N. sanctions against Iraq when the sanctions come up for renewal in late November, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday.
“We keep a close eye on Iraq. We will continue to work on modifying the sanctions regime so we keep the Iraqi regime bottled up with respect to the development of weapons of mass destruction,” he told a joint news conference with British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
The United States failed in June to win Russian support for its sanctions proposals, which would ease the restrictions on Iraqi imports of civilian goods while keeping in place the controls over military imports and Iraqi oil revenues.
Without Russian support, the U.N. Security Council merely extended the existing “oil-for-food” arrangements.
Powell said a new system should ensure that sanctions do not hurt the people of Iraq and that Iraqis can get the goods that they need. “I think the entire international community is united around that strategy,” he added.
US President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin met in China last weekend but a Western diplomat said Bush did not appear to make any progress in persuading the Russians that it was time to change the system.
“(Putin) may have touched on the issue of Iraq, but there was certainly no movement in Russia’s stance on smart sanctions,” said the diplomat, who asked not to be named.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Tuesday: “We’ve discussed (the sanctions proposal) with the Russians. We’ll keep discussing it with the Russians.”
IRAQI DEATHS: Powell made reform of the Iraqi sanctions one of his priorities when he took office in January but Russia, Iraq and its neighbours have thwarted his efforts.
His aim was to counter the Iraqi argument that the sanctions have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, an argument widely accepted outside the United States and Europe.
Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden, the prime suspect in the suicide hijacking attacks on New York and Washington on Sept. 11, has cited the sanctions against Iraq as one of the reasons for waging war on the United States.
Iraq, which had a biological weapons programme in the 1980s, is also under suspicion in the United States in connection with the cases of anthrax spread by letters to US politicians and media organizations.
Powell said bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization was the top priority in Washington’s war on terrorism.
“Then in due course, we will turn our attention to other sources of terrorism which are so destabilizing in the world, and we’ll keep a close eye on Iraq during that whole process,” he added.
Straw, whose country has joined in the bombing of Afghanistan, said there were two criteria for military action against countries thought to be protecting “terrorists”.
“You take military action on the basis of the clearest possible evidence of wrongdoing and also following a view that no other methods of restraint will work,” he said.
“Those conditions have been present in respect to the al Qaeda organization and the Taliban in Afghanistan. But it is only there, at the moment, that military action is on the agenda,” he added.—Reuters
