A group of Coloradans sees the nation firsthand and joins members of Congress in asking that restrictions be lifted

AMARA, Iraq – Iraqi Lt. Khaled Ramady stands proudly in front
of a dilapidated brick fort after a Colorado peace group passes
by.

He and his troops consider themselves “at war” with U.S. and
British warplanes that regularly bomb Iraq. And they won’t let
visitors check their guns, just as their leader Saddam Hussein
won’t let United Nations inspectors look for possible chemical,
biological and nuclear weapons.

Kuwait is “our right,” 24-year-old Ramady adds.

“As long as you want to dominate my country, we will fight
you.”

Now much of the world is starting to believe that and
wondering what to do.

For nearly 10 years, a United Nations economic and military
crackdown – the most comprehensive in history – has tried to
control Saddam Hussein. And he’s still having his way, while 24
million working Iraqis struggle. U.N. officials say average
incomes have dropped from around $1,200 to $10 a month.

The United States remains firmly committed to defeating
Hussein. U.S. policy calls for “containment until regime change” –
making sure he doesn’t threaten other countries or amass weapons,
and eventually removing him from power.

But the Colorado peace group, which was in Iraq recently on a
12-day fact-finding mission, is not the only such organization
calling for a new course of action to ease the plight of ordinary
Iraqis.

Some 70 members of U.S. Congress this month asked President
Clinton “to turn a new page in our dealings with Iraq” and lift
the economic sanctions.

And the 50-nation coalition marshaled to fight the Gulf War
against Iraq “is certainly deteriorating,” said Diane Rennack,
foreign policy analyst for the U.S. Congressional Research Service.

U.N. Security Council members France, China and Russia for
months have challenged U.S. and British efforts to ensure rigorous
weapons inspections in Iraq. Commercial interests in oil-rich Iraq
are growing.

On Feb. 2, a Russian tanker was caught smuggling Iraqi oil in
violation of the embargo. U.S. Navy SEALs seized that tanker.
Embargo-defying trade is on the rise, U.S. officials warn,
reaching an estimated $25 million worth of illegal oil exports a
month.

Inside Iraq, the nine Coloradans encountered European and
Chinese business groups edging into the once-prosperous country
they expect will bounce back if sanctions are lifted. Taxi drivers
running the road between Amman, Jordan, and Baghdad say they move
more and more French, Russian, Chinese and Canadian businessmen
scoping out opportunities. Private-sector patience with sanctions
is wearing thin.

Hans von Sponeck, the senior U.N. official in Iraq,
questioned the morality of continuing “to keep a nation in the
refrigerator. … We must give each other a chance.” On Sunday,
von Sponeck asked to be relieved of his duties – he’d be the
second U.N. chief in Baghdad to resign.

And senior Iraqi officials, in interviews around Baghdad,
insisted Iraq wants only to live in peace.

So what does this mean for U.S. influence in the 21st century
– especially when it comes to maintaining multilateral economic
sanctions?

Dozens of countries are targets of unilateral U.S. sanctions
– a traditional foreign policy tool, short of war, designed to
further U.S. interests. But in a global economy where commerce is
ever more fluid, experts believe that only by building
international consensus can the United States really bring
pressure to bear. That requires serious diplomacy.

“To the extent the United States pushes too hard, it will
stimulate resistance” from other world powers, warns Richard
Haass, director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings
Institute in Washington, D.C., and a senior adviser to President
Bush during the 1991 Gulf War that repulsed Iraq’s invasion of
Kuwait.

Yet Haass said he’s baffled by critics of sanctions against
Iraq. Ordinary Iraqis may be suffering, he said. “It’s just
important that people not blame the sanctions for what is the
cynical result of Iraqi policy.”

Sanctions must continue, he said, lest Hussein do something
outrageous. “It’s only a question of when, not if. Clearly the
best outcome is he’s out of power.”

But he’s not. And some U.S. officials say he may be re-arming.

So, the U.S. government is lobbying hard for a new U.N. plan
that would return weapons inspectors to Iraq in return for
eventually lifting sanctions. Hussein “is still a threat to
Kuwait,” contends Beth Jones, deputy assistant U.S. Secretary of
State focusing on Iraq. “Inspectors would make it better.”

In preparation for their January trip, members of the
Colorado peace group wanted to speak with a weapons inspector.
They turned to U.S. Air Force Capt. Eric Jackson, 31, raised in
Buena Vista and now stationed in Wyoming.

An aerospace engineer, Jackson spent four and a half months
in 1996 and 1997 working in Iraq with Richard Butler on the United
Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspection team.

He traveled up and down roads – including the one in front of
Lt. Ramady’s fort – stopping everywhere from fertilizer plants to
storage bunkers in search of weapons material.

Iraq “was probably six months away from having the (nuclear)
bomb in 1991,” Jackson told the Coloradans. And Iraqis may well
have learned, from U.S. military advisers in the 1980s, details of
U.S. satellite surveillance, he said.

But “sanctions are not going to work,” he contends. They are
a crude “continuation of the medieval approach of surrounding
castles and trying to starve people out.”

Moreover, current U.S. demands for Iraq to allow more
inspections amount to “an untenable position,” Jackson said,
because chemical and biological weapons in a relatively
industrialized country such as Iraq can be practically impossible
to detect.

In Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials insisted Hussein has no
territorial ambitions – and the top U.N. official backed up their
case for easing economic sanctions.

“We want only to maintain our sovereignty as a nation. We
would like to have peaceful coexistence between Iraq and its
neighbors,” Usama Badraldin, a senior foreign ministry official,
said in a Denver Post interview.

Yet the new U.N. plan to end sanctions after bringing in
inspectors “is unworkable,” he said, because it would prolong a
process already tainted by allegations that some inspectors shared
information with intelligence agencies.

Iraqi officials didn’t express any urgency toward breaking
today’s deadlock. “It’s up to the United States,” Badraldin said,
“to decide how to roll the ball. We are open. We are ready. We
have no precondition other than: Respect our dignity. Respect our
sovereignty.”

A senior official of Saddam’s ruling Baath Party, Abdul
Hashemi – a Boston University graduate who later served as Iraq’s
ambassador to France and as education minister – spoke for the
government in a meeting with the Colorado group.

“What Iraq wants: Just leave us alone,” he said. “We have
oil. The United States wants oil. The oil we have, we will sell
it. We can’t drink it. We will not prevent you from getting it.
And we will not let Iraqi oil be used against you.”

He denounced U.S. efforts to “liberate” Iraq by toppling
Hussein, and challenged the Coloradans to see today’s conflict
from a broader perspective.

“If you are really for human rights,” he implored, “then
respect those rights for me.”

Meantime, weapons inspections vehicles were lined up and
ready to go outside von Sponeck’s U.N. office.

Von Sponeck warned that today’s standoff between governments
is creating an angry generation of Iraqis whose education and diet
are deteriorating under economic sanctions.

Millions of working Iraqis “have nothing to do with whatever
was done by their leaders,” von Sponeck said in a Denver Post
interview earlier this month.

“So why should they be hooked in the first place? It’s
regrettable that, in the confrontation of Iraq, the population
itself is taken for granted. This is the call that any responsible
person has to make: end the singling out of a population to
continue to suffer.”

Back in the United States, some of the 70 Congress members
who signed a Jan. 31 letter asking President Clinton to lift
economic sanctions planned to introduce Iraq legislation this
week. It aims at easing the humanitarian situation while
continuing an embargo on weapons.

Current policy “is not compassionate, and it’s not consistent
with our moral position in the world,” said U.S. Rep. Tom Campbell
(R-Calif.), a co-author of the letter to Clinton. “And we’re not
accomplishing what we set out to do. … You’re not pressuring
Saddam with these economic sanctions. You’re hurting his people.”

In Iraq, from civil servants to mothers depending on food
rations in slums, people begged the visiting Coloradans for
relief.

“I just want to raise my children,” implored Sabeha Taher, a
single mother of five, in a crumbling home in the ancient city of
Samarra.

“It’s my duty,” she said. “What can we do?”