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Powell Defends US Plan to Modify Sanctions Against Iraq
US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday the Bush administration planned to modify its sanctions against Iraq in order to rescue the sanctions policy that was collapsing.
Speaking at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Powell said the Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein "must have the U.N. inspectors go back into the country if he wants to get out of sanctions, if he wants to regain control of the oil-for-food escrow accounts."
Although it is still formulating a policy for Iraq, the Bush administration is moving to support removing curbs on trade with Iraq on consumer goods while maintaining curbs on assistance to Saddam's weapons program and on the flow of oil.
Powell denied that modifying the sanctions to ease their impact on civilians represented a retreat by the Bush administration. He said: "What we are trying to do is to see how we could stabilize the collapsing situation."
"This wasn't an effort to ease the sanctions; this was an effort to rescue the sanctions policy that was collapsing," Powell said.
"We discovered that we were in an airplane that was heading to a crash. And what we have done and what we are trying to do is to pull it out of that dive and put it on an altitude that's sustainable, bring the coalition back together," he said.
"We would also make sure that the Iraqi regime understood that we reserve the right to strike militarily any activity out there, any facility we find that is inconsistent with their obligations to get rid of such weapons of mass destruction," Powell added.
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