vThe Peace Agreement

    The terms of the peace agreement included compensation payments to Kuwait, inspections to guarantee that Iraq was no longer making or storing weapons of mass destruction, and the establishment of "no-fly zones" to protect the Shiites and Kurds from government air attacks.  Unless these demands were met by Iraq, the sanctions wold remain in place. Hussein remained in power, despite revolts among the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south and his isolation from almost all other Arab nations.

    During the Iran-Iraq war, oil shipments were limited to trucks or pipeline.  The boycott after the invasion of Kuwait and the damage to the oil fields during the Gulf War cut deeply into Iraq's oil revenues.  The UN Security Council seized all Iraqi assets abroad to compensate the victims of the war and to pay for UN inspection expenses in Iraq.  The debts incurred during the Iran-Iraq war, along with the boycott, the loss of assets and the cost of reparations, have left the Iraqi economy in shambles.

The Problem of Disarming Iraq

    After the Gulf War, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) was charged with disarming Iraq, using intelligence-gathering methods to destroy Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons programs.  Because Iraq was so weakened, inspectors from around the world thought the job would be complete in a year or so.  Eight years later, UNSOM inspectors left Iraq, and the job is still not done.  In 1995, two of Hussein's sons-in-law (with their bodyguards and a group of insiders) defected to Jordan.  They provided evidence of the existence of biological weapons, many made and stored in private residences, and easily huttled around the country under the noses of the UN inspectors.

Iraq's many deceptions and barriers to inspections, in order to hide their weapons production and storage sites, caused the US to employ some of its latest communications spy technology at UNSCOM's request.  The sophisticated technology and the information the technology yields are customarily not shared, and as UNSCOM's work became more secretive, it became less open with the member states.  Tensions among them built. At the same time that Iraq refused to allow inspections of suspected weaons sites, the US was accused of using information from the "spy technology" for its own ends, and the team was recalled.  The four-day aerial attack by the US and Great Britain in December 1998 dealt the final blow to UNSCOM.

    At the end of 1998, the UN was faced with some tough choices.  What could the UN do that would have the support of UN member nations to check Hussein's threat to the stability of the Middle East?  Military attacks have had little international support and do not provide any long-term solution.  Doing nothing or invading and occupying Baghdad were both considered unacceptable.  In the first case, Iraq would continue to produce weapons of mass destruction and pose a continued threat to the whole Middle East.  In the second case, the costs of occupying an Arab capital, financially and politically, would be disastrous.