UN and Iraq Sanctions Fact Sheet ~June 30th 2011 ~ Times Up ~ Iraq and UN Security Council Fact Sheet Dec. 15th 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010The move signals the return to the community of nations for the war-torn country.
It wasn’t quite a declaration of "mission accomplished," but Vice President Joe Biden trumpeted the United Nations Security Council decision today to wind back two decades of sanctions against Iraq as marking the war-ravaged nation’s return to good standing in the international community.
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At the behest of the Obama administration, the 15-member Security Council voted this morning to remove restrictions on the sale of nuclear technology to Iraq, to end the once-controversial U.N. oil-for-food program, and to discontinue international management of Baghdad's oil and gas revenue at the end of June 2011.
“In recent years, the Iraqi people have emerged from the depths of sectarian violence,” said Biden, who travelled to U.N. headquarters in New York to chair the meeting. “They have flatly rejected the grim future offered by extremists and they have earned themselves the chance for much better days ahead.”
Today’s meeting was more symbolic than substantive. Nonetheless, it marks an important milestone for the White House as President Obama prepares to end the U.S. presence in Iraq at the end of next year.
With the lifting of sanctions, the administration fulfilled a two-year-old agreement that the United States would help Iraq get out of the web of economic and trade sanctions that the U.N. began piling on after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.
The paralyzing sanctions turned the oil-rich country into a Middle East backwater. Iraq, which in the 1990s still had stockpiles of chemical weapons, biological weapons, and long-range missiles, was forced to submit to U.N. monitoring to ensure that it was complying with a mandate to rid itself of weapons of mass destruction.
The United States created no-fly zones in northern and southern Iraq, establishing areas in which Iraqi aircraft were forbidden to fly. Oil sales were supposed to be tightly controlled through the controversial U.N. oil-for-food program, but that program was undermined by corruption, allowing Hussein and his cronies to siphon off billions of dollars through oil smuggling and kickbacks from those selling goods to Iraq and buying oil from the country.
Meanwhile, Iraq’s people slid into deep poverty. UNICEF said the first eight years of sanctions may have been responsible for 500,000 deaths of children younger than 5.
Iraq’s troubles go back even further, as Hussein leveraged the once robust Gulf country’s oil-based economy to fight a costly war against Iran that also left tens of thousands of Iraqis dead.
Iraq still owes Kuwait nearly $24 billion in war reparations. One resolution passed delayed Kuwait’s claims against Iraq through June 2011. Iraq’s infrastructure is in tatters and will take tens of billions in investment to get it back to pre-Gulf War standards. The nation is also beleaguered by massive unemployment.
Still, Biden, U.N. Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, and other Security Council members heralded the removal of sanctions as ushering in a new era in which Iraq is now fully in control of its destiny.
What role the United States will have in Iraq beyond the end of next year still needs to be worked out. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last month that the United States is open to keeping some troops in Iraq beyond the 2011 deadline.
“We'll stand by," Gates said. "We're ready to have that discussion if and when they want to raise it with us."
http://nationaljournal.com/whitehouse/biden-heralds-the-end-of-un-sanctions-against-iraq-20101215
