‘To request the lifting of economic sanctions on Iraq represents a dilemma for the U.N. Security Council because it never approved the actions against the regime of Sadam Hussein.’

In the next few days, Iraq will return to occupy the center of the discussions and divisions among the members of the Security Council of the United Nations after the United States government presented a resolution project to let this organization lift the economic embargo imposed since the beginning of the 90s, thus allowing the U.S. to take charge of the administration of Iraq’s oil.

The petition represents a serious dilemma for the Security Council because the opposition of the majority of its members towards military actions against the regime of Sadam Hussein is still fresh, a fact that undoubtedly subtracted legitimacy to the intervention.

To lift the sanctions on a country now devastated is unquestionable in the presence of so many needs at the humanitarian, internal security, infrastructure reconstruction, and economic reactivation level. However, if the resolution is approved under the terms in which it was presented, in a diplomatic language this will mean a retroactive approval of the military operations.

The project relegates the U.N. to a secondary and less vital role, as until recently affirmed by the Americans and their allies. Even a program as important as oil for food, managed by the U.N. before the war, would become a responsibility of the occupying forces.

The U.S. proposal does not even contemplate the return of the U.N. inspectors of weapons of mass destruction to verify if Iraq has, or doesn’t have, that type of armament. This is a reminder of the fact that precisely one of the conditions to lift the economic embargo, according to one of the resolutions of the Security Council, was to verify the existence of arms of this nature.

If the United States and England were not to agree with other members of the Security Council that have veto capabilities (Russia, France and China) about a new resolution project through which the United Nations can gain strength regarding the reconstruction of Iraq, Washington’s decision to leave out this important multilateral organism is not to be discarded.

Within the context of universal unipolarity that prevails in today’s world the U.S. has given sufficient samples of its disposition of behavior, if necessary, to stay outside the frame of action imposed by the maximum organism of security.