Iraq’s Arms--Don’t Trust, Do Verify : U.N. sanctions against oil exports should be lifted only under the strictest conditions

Iraq’s biggest money-earner is oil, but ever since the 1991 Persian Gulf War that nation has been under U.N. Security Council-imposed sanctions that have kept its oil from being sold on world markets and prevented hard currency from flowing into Baghdad’s treasury. Those sanctions would be lifted, the council said 3 1/2 years ago, once it was clear that Iraq no longer posed a security threat to its neighbors, especially Kuwait, which Iraq invaded and brutally occupied in 1990.

Now the council has been told by Rolf Ekeus, the diplomat it put in charge of monitoring Iraq’s military status, that Saddam Hussein’s regime has lost its capability to produce weapons of mass destruction--nuclear, chemical or biological--and that therefore the regional military threat it presents has been largely removed.

Assuming the oversight system put in place by the United Nations to make sure Iraq doesn’t cheat on the weapons ban works, the council will probably be asked sometime next spring to allow Iraq once again to begin exporting oil. Under the right conditions--and only under the right conditions--the United States should support that request.

A key condition is that Baghdad give up its spurious claim that Kuwait is simply a lost province that Iraq has the right to reclaim by force. Kuwait is an internationally recognized sovereign country, as legitimate a political entity as Iraq itself, and Baghdad must recognize it as such, along with the redefined border between the two states that was fixed by the U.N. Boundary Commission in 1992.

A second condition is that Iraq agree to accept indefinite international monitoring of its imports, to prevent it from reacquiring the machinery and materials to rebuild its now liquidated unconventional weapons capability. An essential part of that oversight would be cooperation from all countries that do business with Iraq.

Saddam Hussein’s regime came perilously close to setting up a nuclear weapons industry because it was able to obtain massive amounts of needed technology from outside, often by deceit, sometimes with the compliance of suppliers and export-hungry governments. That can’t be allowed to happen again.

It of course remains a moral outrage that Hussein and his bloody-handed collaborators are still in power. But a change of government in Iraq was not a demand set by the Security Council for lifting the sanctions.

If Iraq is found no longer to be a threat to its neighbors, then the legal basis for the sanctions disappears. The foundation for that finding has now been laid, with a monitoring system to ensure Iraq doesn’t rearm soon to be tested. If that system can be shown to work effectively, and with the additional conditions we noted above, the time will have come to lift the sanctions.