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US Backs Change of Policy on Iraq
The United States is backing Britain to propose next week that the United Nations ease an 11-year-old ban on international trade with Iraq in a bid to offset growing international criticism of the sanction regime.
"We're working toward what will be a significant change in our approach to Iraq in the United Nations," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said on Thursday.
"The focus is on strengthening controls to prevent Iraq from rebuilding military capability in weapons of mass destruction while facilitating a broader flow of goods to the civilian population of Iraq," he added.
The long-awaited British-American proposal, if adopted by the UN Security Council, would prohibit only the sale of a specific list of arms and weapons-related items to Iraq, The New York Times reported Thursday.
But the plan would require Iraq to allow international arms inspections to resume before any sanctions could be lifted, and it would reject Iraqi demands to return to Baghdad the control over money Iraq earns from oil sales.
That money, according to the U.S. paper, would still be deposited into a U.N.-supervised escrow account, to be drawn on for imports.
Iraq has reportedly said that it would accept nothing short of an end to the embargo.
Britain and the United States, which had insisted on maintaining the sanctions against Iraq, began to consider readjustment of its policy against Iraq a few months ago in face of growing pressure from the international community to ease the embargo.
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