Ewen MacAskill and Richard Norton-Taylor Monday January 8, 2001
The British government, in a policy u-turn, is to propose to the incoming US administration that the bombing of targets over southern Iraq should be stopped. British and US planes have enforced no-fly zones along Iraq's northern and southern borders since 1992. In the past two years alone, they have dropped more than 100 bombs, mainly against Iraqi air defences.
The bombing, in what is sometimes called the "forgotten war", has led to an unknown number of civilian casualties. Hans von Sponek, the former UN humanitarian coordinator, writing in the Guardian last week, said that 144 civilians had died in the no-fly zones because of the bombing. [...] The official British line is that there are no plans to change the approach to Iraq and that British foreign policy is determined independently of the US. In the Guardian last week, Peter Hain, the Foreign Office minister, strongly defended the no-fly zone policy.
But in reality, the whole of US-British policy towards Iraq is under review as a result of the impending arrival of a new US administration. Among the top foreign policy issues the new president, George W Bush, will have to contend with is how to deal with the renewed confidence of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,419224,00.html