The latest crisis between the United Nations and Baghdad has erupted because Iraq refused to grant unhindered access to all sites to one team of inspectors sent by the UNSCOM to oversee the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Michael Jansen writes.
Iraq has been condemned by the US and Britain, but France, China and Russia have refrained from condemnation. Arab commentators consider this a crisis contrived by the allies to prolong UNSCOM's mission in Iraq and maintain the punitive sanctions regime which has beggared a major Arab country.
The crisis began on Monday when a team of 16 inspectors, who had just arrived in Iraq, conducted what UN sources called "the most aggressive day of surprise inspections" since October. Then confrontation over sites led to a temporary expulsion of the inspectors.
On Monday the inspectors sought and eventually gained access to three highly sensitive locations lodging the Republican Guards and Special Security Organisation, which co-ordinates the work of intelligence agencies providing security for President Saddam Hussein.
The deeply suspicious Iraqis considered inspections of these sites particularly provocative because they were selected by the head of the team, Mr Scott Ritter, a retired US marine captain who took part in the 1991 Gulf war. Iraq has accused him of being a spy for the US defence establishment. (It was Mr Ritter's confrontational style of inspecting sites that launched the October crisis and the US military build-up in the Gulf).
Furthermore, the group was composed of nine US nationals, five Britons with a token representation of one each from Australia and Russia. While the Ritter team remained at base yesterday, teams of 28 other inspectors with a wider geographical representation continued their search for biological agents in a non-confrontational mode.
One Arab source told The Irish Times the "timing of this provocation" was suspicious, because the UNSCOM chief, Mr Richard Butler, was due in Baghdad on January 19th to assess the progress in disarmament for the Security Council, which will then decide whether or not to ease sanctions. A crisis between UNSCOM and Iraq would guarantee a negative report. This source said that a "crisis justifies the continued deployment of the American armada in the Gulf and, perhaps, even a military strike against Iraq".
In the Arab view, the US and British objective has been to tighten the "containment" of Iraq at the very time Iran has broken out of its "containment" and begun to re-emerge as a regional power.