The second Gulf War

Two years after British and American warplanes tried to teach Baghdad a les son for defying United Nations arms inspections, the arms inspectors are st ill not back in Iraq. This article discusses the stand-off between the international society and Iraq after the Operation Desert Fox in December 1998. It focuses on two asp ects of the conflict: On the one hand the tension between the permanent mem bers of the UN Security Council on the future of the nine-year old S.C. res olution 687, and, on the other, an apparent shift in the US Iraq policy - t he Clinton administration's final retreat from a policy of making the UN a focal point of its policy.