TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/080591/0805002.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.7 KB | 116 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 31

COVER STORIES

IRAQ

D-Day? More Like ZZZ-Day


Saddam wins time to come clean on his killer arsenal, but the
U.S. rejects his plea to lift sanctions

By JILL SMOLOWE -- Reported by William Mader/London and J.F.O.
McAllister and Bruce van Voorst/Washington


    Saddam Hussein is a lucky man. When the United Nations
gave the Iraqi leader until July 25 to reveal once and for all
the scope of his country's weapons program, George Bush backed
up the deadline with the threat of a military strike. But that
was before Secretary of State James Baker's shuttle diplomacy in
the Middle East began to show promise. When the deadline passed
last week, Washington charged that Baghdad had still not come
clean. But the military threat against Saddam is on hold -- at
least for the moment.

    U.S. officials insisted that the July 25 cutoff -- "Marker
Day," not D-day, a State Department official helpfully explained
-- was never intended to signal the immediate resumption of
allied aerial strikes against Iraq. The arrival last Saturday
of yet another U.N. inspection team in Baghdad gives Saddam
additional breathing space. But the truth is that the current
appetite for renewed warfare is slight. Bush does not want to
seem trigger-happy when he arrives in Moscow this week for talks
with Mikhail Gorbachev. And Arab allies, whose cooperation is
crucial to any Middle East peace conference, have signaled their
distaste for new bombardments. "Most of our people think the
Iraqis have suffered enough already," says a senior Egyptian
diplomat.

    Mounting concern for the plight of hungry Iraqi citizens
is also forcing Washington and its European allies to temper
their hard-line stance on continued economic sanctions. The
drumbeat to ease the embargo began when Prince Sadruddin Aga
Khan, who heads the U.N.'s relief efforts in the gulf, warned
that food and medicine shortages presented "a humanitarian
crisis that could degenerate into a catastrophe." His
recommendation: a U.N.-regulated sale of Iraqi oil to raise $2.6
billion, enough to cover humanitarian needs for the next four
months. Last week the Bush Administration reluctantly supported
a one-time-only oil sale, provided the revenues are monitored
by an international organization to ensure that they are not
diverted for military purposes.

    The apparent softening of the U.S. position is really no
more than hard political reality: Bush cannot appear to be
indifferent to the plight of innocent Iraqi citizens. Washington
officials believe, with good cause, that Saddam has ample food
to feed his people. Since March 22, the Security Council's
sanctions committee has received notice of exporters' intentions
to ship more than 2 million tons of food to Iraq -- nearly one
ton for every nine Iraqis. In addition, Baghdad has been
permitted to import generators, medical supplies, water pumps
and water-treatment systems.

    Iraq has ample money to spend on medical needs, if Saddam
so chooses. By Washington's reckoning, Saddam has access to as
much as $1 billion in foreign accounts. Baghdad is also
believed to have $2 billion worth of stockpiled gold and an
additional $1 billion worth looted from Kuwait's Central Bank.
"Saddam has enough for vital imports at the moment, if he were
to define vital imports as including food and medicine," says
Patrick Clawson, an expert on the Iraqi economy and editor of
the Philadelphia-based foreign-policy journal Orbis. "Instead,
he's buying luxury goods for his immediate entourage, equipment
for his security apparatus and military goods."

    Meanwhile, U.S. officials last week provided more details
about Iraq's nuclear-, biological- and chemical-weapons program.
According to Washington, Baghdad had almost 100 different major
weapons programs under way before the gulf war began. The effort
employed 500,000 people, which, in a country of 18 million, made
the defense industry far and away Iraq's largest employer. One
nuclear complex in Thaji, north of Baghdad, comprised 1,000
buildings and covered an area the size of the District of
Columbia. U.S. officials also disclosed more specifics about
Iraq's uranium-enrichment programs, the linchpin of Baghdad's
efforts to develop an atom bomb. In addition to the three
methods for separating uranium isotopes -- gas centrifuge,
calutron and gaseous diffusion -- already identified by
Washington, Iraq relied on a chemical technique and a jet-nozzle
process used in South Africa. New intelligence information has
also confirmed that Iraq's chemical stocks are actually 40%
larger than Baghdad has admitted. Inspection efforts have been
hampered because much of the stock is either buried beneath
rubble or stored in leaking canisters that pose health risks.
U.N. inspectors were recently treated to a sampling of the
remaining inventory when Iraqis, instructed to destroy bomb- and
artillery-shell casings, scattered a dose of unidentified
chemicals just upwind of the U.N. team.

    Biological agents, including anthrax and botulism toxin,
remain the biggest threat. At the time of the allied aerial
attacks last winter, pilots avoided targeting sites where
biological weapons were believed to be stored, or hitting them
with incendiary bombs. According to Air Force Lieut. General
Charles Horner, who ran the allied air campaign, a strike by a
conventional bomb could have spread a deadly agent across the
countryside, killing millions. As a result, Iraq's biological
stocks are largely intact, and a U.S. attack poses the same
risks that it did during the war. Unless Saddam discloses the
whereabouts of his entire arsenal, Iraq will retain at least
some of its biological weapons.