August 27, 2000

              The United States is currently providing help to a number of nations
              engulfed in humanitarian crises, including Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Bosnia, and
              I can think of another that certainly fits the bill. In the aftermath of
              wars that wrecked the economy, its people have suffered widespread
              malnutrition, epidemics of disease, and soaring child and infant mortality.
              This country would be a perfect candidate for American help--if it weren't
              Iraq.

              In the 10 years since Saddam Hussein launched his ill-fated invasion of
              Kuwait, Iraqis have had to bear the burden not only of a bloodthirsty
              tyrant, but also the weight of an international economic embargo. The
              embargo, championed mainly by Washington, has largely failed to achieve its
              objectives, but every failure is cited as proof that it must continue.

              Continue it probably will, because Hussein refuses to meet our price for
              lifting the sanctions. Last week, the UN assembled a new team of arms
              inspectors who are supposed to go into Iraq and make sure it has no nuclear,
              chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction (WMDs). "If the Iraqis
              don't comply," threatened a U.S. official, "the sanctions will stay in
              place." But the government in Baghdad promptly advised the UN to go take a
              long walk off a short pier.

              This response was no surprise. Hussein is about as likely to accede to our
              demands as he is to star in a Broadway musical. In fact, the only reason to
              propose new inspections is for the pleasure of seeing Iraq reject them,
              giving us an excuse to maintain our policy.

              Hussein is quite willing to weather the sanctions in order to continue his
              effort to acquire armaments we don't want him to have. He's been doing that
              for 10 years now. The only way he would accept international monitors is if
              he were confident he could prevent them from carrying out their mission--not
              because he's ready to go straight and wants his change of heart confirmed.

              The UN inspectors were inside Iraq for years, and though they found a lot of
              forbidden munitions and facilities, Hussein managed to keep them from
              finding everything they were looking for. As RAND Corp. analyst Daniel Byman
              has noted, the inspections "never led to the ultimate success: a complete
              accounting of Iraq's programs and the destruction of all WMD materials." For
              all our trouble, Iraq is still presumed to have chemical and biological
              weapons, if not nuclear ones.

              So we are back to the usual minuet: We demand cooperation on arms
              inspections, he refuses, and we mete out punishment, trying to starve or
              bomb Iraq into submission--neither of which ever works. In the end, things
              are the same as they were before.

              That may be frustrating for us, but it's really no picnic for the people of
              Iraq, whose country has been turned into a permanent disaster area. As the
              organization Human Rights Watch reported earlier this year, the sanctions
              carry "a high human price, paid primarily by women and children. The food
              rationing system provides less than 60 percent of the required daily calorie
              intake, the water and sanitation systems are in a state of collapse, and
              there is a critical shortage of life-saving drugs."

              Thanks to the lack of clean water, diseases like cholera have become
              commonplace. Malnutrition is rampant. Infant and child mortality has more
              than doubled in the last decade. Hundreds of thousands of people have died
              due to this multitude of woes.

              American policymakers disavow any blame for such consequences, saying it
              rests entirely on Saddam Hussein, who has diverted his country's meager
              resources into building up his military arsenal rather than alleviating the
              misery of his subjects. But even UN experts admit that life in Iraq would be
              much less grim without the embargo.

              Of course, there are unfortunate occasions when we have to inflict hardship
              on innocent people to achieve something vital. In this case, though, we
              haven't accomplished our goal, and we're not about to. That makes it hard to
              justify long-distance torture of ordinary Iraqis, who have no more control
              over their leader than we do.

              Absent a U.S. invasion, we ultimately can't deprive Hussein of weapons of
              mass destruction, any more than we were able to deprive Stalin or Mao. What
              we can do to him is exactly what we did with those enemies: Make clear that
              any use of such weapons will assure our cataclysmic retaliation. Unlike our
              current policy, that one has been shown to work.

              The U.S. government has always said we have no quarrel with the people of
              Iraq, only with their leader. Maybe it's time we started acting like it.