The UN weapons inspections came to an abrupt end in 1998 after two years of Iraqi
refusals to cooperate. This period began in June 1996, when Iraq blocked inspectors from
sites that UNSCOM had identified as weapons-storage locations. The confrontation arose
as Iraq and the United Nations negotiated the terms under which Iraq could sell oil on
the international market to raise money for purchases of food and humanitarian goods.
The standoff continued throughout 1997 and into 1998, with Iraq defying repeated Secu-
rity Council resolutions demanding that it allow the inspectors total access to suspect sites.
In particular, Iraq for several months barred the inspectors from entering any of eight
presidential palaces, giant buildings scattered around the country that the United Nations
suspected of housing some weapons programs. Iraq also sought to delay and undermine
the inspections by accusing the United States of putting intelligence agents on the inspec-
tion teams. (It was later revealed that U.S. agents were indeed posted on the UN teams.)
In August 1998 Iraq announced that it was ending all cooperation with UNSCOM.
After more confrontations and attempts to negotiate an arrangement, the United
Nations withdrew its inspectors on December 15, 1998. The next day, the United States
and Britain began a four-day bombing campaign, Operation Desert Fox, targeting sus-
pected weapons plants and intelligence and military installations in Iraq. These bomb-
ings were the most extensive attacks against Iraq since the Persian Gulf War nearly
eight years earlier.
Political developments in the United States made the bombing campaign somewhat
controversial. In October, Congress had passed, and President Bill Clinton had signed,
the Iraq Liberation Act (PL 105-338), a resolution explicitly calling for the removal of
Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. This elicited protests from UN secretary-
general Kofi Annan and others that the United States was undermining UN diplo-
macy toward Iraq. Also at the time of the bombings, Clinton faced impeachment pro-
ceedings in the House of Representatives resulting from his extramarital affair with a
White House intern. Some Republicans in Congress accused Clinton of ordering the
bombings of Iraq to distract attention from the impeachment.
On January 25, 1999, UNSCOM sent what turned out to be its final substantive
report to the Security Council reviewing the status of its inspections and Iraq’s weapons
programs. Written by Australian diplomat Richard Butler, the last head of UNSCOM,
the report confirmed that Iraq had eliminated many of the weapons and weapons pro-
grams banned by the Security Council. Butler wrote, however, that many questions
remained concerning whether Iraq continued to conceal large quantities of these
weapons. In particular, Butler suggested that Iraq might not have destroyed all of two
major types of chemical weapons—mustard gas and the VX nerve gas—and appeared
still to be hiding elements of its ballistic missile and biological weapons programs. But-
ler’s report hardened suspicions, particularly in the United States, that Iraq was still
producing banned weapons. These suspicions, bolstered by the reports of U.S. intel-
ligence agencies, helped form the basis of the allegations by President George W. Bush
in 2002–2003 that Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction (Iraq War Prelude,
p. 486).
Oil for Food
The economic sanctions that the United Nations imposed against Iraq after its inva-
sion of Kuwait in August 1990 prohibited nearly all international trade with Iraq. The
IRAQ AND THE GULF WARS 475