Western efforts to avoid military action against Iraq intensified yesterday with a clear signal from the United States and Britain that punitive economic sanctions will end if President Saddam Hussein complies fully with United Nations arms inspections. As Russia announced it had reached agreement with Iraq on avoiding confrontation, British officials said the US had been persuaded to end six years of ambiguity about the lifting of the oil embargo.
Since 1991 the US has deliberately clouded this key point by suggesting that for sanctions to end there would have to be action on human rights and compensation to Kuwait as well as full compliance on weapons inspections.
France and Russia, Baghdad's best friends on the Security Council, have long argued that UN resolution 687 promises that sanctions will end once the UN special commission (Unscom) certifies that Iraq has no more weapons of mass destruction.
A second Anglo-American proposal expands an existing arrangement that allows Iraq to sell more oil under UN control to buy humanitarian supplies for civilians.
Dangling a third carrot at Baghdad, diplomats said Unscom would formally switch from its current highly intrusive inspections to more passive monitoring as Iraq was given clean bills of health in the nuclear, chemical and biological fields.
The Iraqi government newspaper claimed that Baghdad had scored a "resounding political and diplomatic triumph", representing "a crushing defeat for America and Britain".
"If America attacks Iraq, it will face severe condemnation from various world countries . . . If it retreats and brokers an agreement through the United Nations or directly with Iraq, this means victory of peace and dialogue," an editorial in al-Jumhouriya said.
The strains of the current crisis surfaced in Washington yesterday when President Clinton ordered more US aircraft to the Gulf after two days which have seen the Departments of State and Defence at loggerheads over Iraq. Mr Clinton was said to be "furious" about the conflicting policies.
A US U-2 spy plane flew a UN mission over central Iraq without incident yesterday despite threats by Baghdad to shoot down such aircraft.
In London, British officials made clear that the return of Unscom, withdrawn last week, was not negotiable. However, there were clear hints at flexibility about Unscom's composition - reflecting understanding of Iraq's original complaint that there were too many Americans on the inspection teams.
In Moscow yesterday the Russian Foreign Minister, Mr Yevgeny Primakov, said after he and President Yeltsin met the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Tariq Aziz: "A programme has been worked out which will allow us to avoid a violent confrontation and the use of force and liquidate the crisis." There are inevitably suspicions that Mr Aziz is exploiting Russia's frustration at being excluded from great power diplomacy in the Middle East by allowing Mr Yeltsin to pose as a global peacemaker.
Russia, which hopes to win oil contracts and recover old debts from Iraq, has long called for the sanctions against Baghdad to be slackened.