During the recent air strike against Iraq the US and British pilots hit less than half their targets, the Associated Press quotes a US Defense Department official as saying. The Pentagon declared that, although the strikes were not 100% successful, the Defense Department was satisfied with their results. As earlier reported, on late February 16 twenty-four British and American aircraft attacked facilities of the Iraqi Air Defense System (predominantly its radar installations), allegedly to curb Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s increasing appetite to build up Iraq’s military might. As CBS reports, the allied planes managed to hit only eight radars out of a total of twenty.
This time international criticism against the United State and Great Britain was much more widespread than ten years ago when Operation Desert Storm was launched against Iraq. Apart from Russia and China, France and Italy did not approve of this bombing of Iraq. As Italy’s Prime Minister Giuliano Amato stressed, the operation only added to Husseins’s popularity. In fact, Ukraine did not support the strikes either. Speaking to the media on February 22, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Volodymyr Yelchenko declared that the Ukrainian delegation circulated a statement in the UN Security Council saying, “the timing of the air strikes is ill-chosen.” Mr. Yelchenko also emphasized that the American-British air strikes were aimed against targets that are not located in the no-fly zone, areas banned to Iraqi planes. According to the allies, their recent operation has been provoked by the danger from Iraqi air defense to American and British aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.
Responding to a question from The Day, Mr. Yelchenko said that the time has come to revise the UN Security Council sanctions against Iraq. In his opinion, these sanctions have become “too cumbersome.” With some of the resolutions on Iraq 25,000 pages long, there is much vagueness and uncertainty in what Baghdad should implement first. Ukraine insists that such basic UN demands like disarmament and a commitment not to produce weapons of mass destruction be put forward to Iraq, but if they are met the economic sanctions against Hussein should be eased. The United States and Britain, however, insist that all UN demands be met by Baghdad.
Meanwhile, it is no secret that the bulk of Iraqis suffer from a lack of food, while the food and pharmaceuticals which can be bought by Iraq under the UN Oil For Food program can hardly meet the demand. The climbing child mortality rate has also been attributed to the UN sanctions. But Saddam Hussein’s regime shows no signs of weakening.
