"The United States has been punctilious about staying within the resolutions up to now," a disappointed aide to Pickering told me after hearing about the Gates threat. "In general, it [the threat] goes beyond the resolution."
The Clinton administration continued the policy in a somewhat different form. As Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in a speech at Georgetown University in 1997: "We do not agree with nations who argue that if Iraq complies with its obligations concerning weapons of mass destruction, sanctions should be lifted. Our view, which is unshakeable, is that Iraq must prove its peaceful intentions. It can only do that by complying with all the Security Council resolutions to which it is subject. Is it possible to conceive of such a government under Saddam Hussein? ... The evidence is overwhelming that Saddam Hussein's intentions will never be peaceful."
Albright's speech should not have been a surprise. It repeated a policy she had spelled out when she was U.N. ambassador earlier in the Clinton administration. Her reference to "all the Security Council resolutions" recalled that the U.N., aside from ordering the elimination of WMD, had demanded that Iraq accept an Iraq-Kuwait boundary worked out by a demarcation commission, account for all missing Kuwaitis and pay compensation to all nations and individuals financially hurt by the war. By linking the lifting of sanctions to all these resolutions, the Clinton administration was placing what it hoped was an impossible burden on Hussein, or at least one that he would regard as intolerable. In her recently published memoirs, Albright described the policy as only "a slightly different approach" from that of the first Bush administration.
Despite this, Richard Butler, the Australian diplomat who led the U.N. inspectors, was surprised by Albright's Georgetown speech. In "The Greatest Threat," his book about dealing with the Iraqis, he insisted that Hussein "could [have achieved] sanctions relief at any time by giving up his weapons." Though the Albright speech, in Butler's view, "somewhat muddied" the issue of sanctions, he didn't regard it as a definitive statement of U.S. policy.
Butler writes that after talking with Bill Richardson, Albright's successor as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., he was authorized to tell Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tarik Aziz in Baghdad in 1998, "I have consulted with the U.S. government on this matter at the Cabinet level, and I am absolutely satisfied that once the disarmament work is completed, there will be no impediment to the lifting of sanctions." That would have been small consolation to Iraq in the absence of any public statement by Albright changing U.S. policy.
