No return for UN inspectors — Iraq

“It is a complete failure and we will never deal with it and it is totally impractical,” Rasheed told a news conference marking the 10th anniversary of the start of the Gulf War on January 17, 1991.

“The only solution is to lift the sanctions and this we deserve because we have fulfilled our part of the deal,” Rasheed said. “The UN Security Council has…to condemn and stop the military aggression in the North and South of Iraq,” he added.

Rasheed also criticised the country’s oil-for-food deal with the United Nations, saying it was too difficult to implement.

“You cannot run a country of 23 million people with revenues of $16 to 20 billion,” under the direction of the Security Council, Rasheed said.

The oil pact allows Iraq to sell unlimited quantities of oil over six months to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies for Iraqis hard pressed by sanctions.

“We have to accept it…until people in the Security Council realise it is high time that sanctions should be lifted,” he said.

He said the resolution had removed Iraq "from a long tunnel where we started to see light, and put us in a new tunnel with new procedures and without an end".

Baghdad has not allowed arms inspectors to return since they left in December 1998 on the eve of a US–British bombing raid, launched to punish Iraq for allegedly obstructing the UN experts investigating sites where Iraq was suspected of storing or manufacturing weapons of mass destruction.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan invited a delegation from Baghdad to visit the United Nations in January to try to break the impasse on weapons inspections but the talks have been postponed until February.

Rasheed called for sanctions to be lifted and the patrols by US and British warplanes of two air exclusion zones in northern and southern Iraq to be ended.

Sanctions were imposed to punish Iraq for its invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The "no-fly" zones were set up to protect a Kurdish enclave in the North and Shi’ite Muslims in the South from attack by Baghdad’s troops after the 1991 Gulf War.

Western air strikes on Iraq have become a regular occurence since Baghdad in December 1998 ordered its anti-aircraft bases to challenge US and British jets on patrol.