Two strategically placed UN officials, one an Irishman, made revelations this week which seriously undermine the continuing UN economic sanctions against Iraq, writes Michael Jansen.
Baghdad contends, and UN humanitarian agencies agree, the sanctions have cost 1.4 million Iraqi lives.
On Tuesday the outgoing Irish co-ordinator of the UN Iraqi oilfor-food programme, Mr Denis Halliday, an assistant-secretary general, left the organisation after 30 years' service in protest against the continuation of sanctions which he said are responsible for the terrible sufferings of a majority of Iraq's 20 million people.
While Mr Halliday conceded there had been an improvement since 1996 when the programme permitting Iraq to sell a limited amount of oil to purchase food and medical supplies was inaugurated, some 7,000 people a month, 4,000 of them children under five, still die as a result of sanctions. Mr Halliday made the point that sanctions strengthened the regime of Mr Saddam Hussein, generally regarded as a brutal dictator, while it punished ordinary Iraqis who are in no position to oppose or overthrow their president.
The second official, Mr Scott Ritter, a former US marine officer who joined the UN after serving in the 1991 war against Iraq, recently tendered his resignation as an arms inspector. He, however, adopted the opposing position on sanctions. Iraq, said Mr Ritter, should be compelled to submit to the strict dictates of the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) eliminating Baghdad's arms of mass destruction and sanctions - and other means of coercion - should be applied until it does. But in an interview with the Israeli daily Haaretz, Mr Ritter revealed that since 1994 he and colleagues in the UNSCOM "discovery" unit had been not only relying on information about Iraq's programmes from Israel's intelligence agency, Mossad, but was also sharing classified material with Israel.
As most of the information shared by Mr Ritter with Israel was gleaned from US satellite imaging, even Washington became worried it could be blamed if Israel used this knowledge to attack Iraq. While the FBI began to investigate Mr Ritter's Israeli connections as soon as he left the UN last month, the Australian head of UNSCOM, Mr Richard Butler, has asked the UN legal department to investigate whether Mr Ritter has broken UN confidentiality by speaking to the press.
The conflicting testimonies of Mr Halliday and Mr Ritter have reinforced the views of Arab governments and their citizens that Baghdad was correct all along in contending that sanctions punished only the innocent and UNSCOM, the agency which decides on whether sanctions should be prolonged or not, has been biased against Iraq.
But even Baghdad, which since last year accused Mr Ritter of being a US intelligence agent, did not claim he was working with, or for, Israel. His admissions have prompted Baghdad to demand an inquiry into UNSCOM's operations. In the Arab world UNSCOM's credibility is nil and Iraq's case for reinstatement in the "Arab fold" has been greatly strengthened.
Aware the US policy of "containing" Iraq through sanctions has passed its "use-by" date, the Republican majority in the US Congress has submitted a bill providing $95 million to finance the overthrow of the Iraqi regime, a near ten-fold increase over the previous $10 million allocated for the task.
The White House opposes such a move at this delicate juncture in Arab-US relations and has asked Congress to think again.
Arab-US relations could be seriously impaired by US-inspired plots against the Iraqi leader, popularly admired because of his defiance of the US, at a time when Arabs accuse the Clinton Administration of failing to pressurise Israel to honour its treaty commitments to the Palestinians.