LONDON, Jan 5 (Reuters) - Britain fired back on Friday at opponents of its hawkish policy
on Iraq, dismissing critics as apologists for President Saddam Hussein's "brutal rule."

Junior Foreign Office Minister Peter Hain said Britain wanted to see 10-year economic
sanctions on Baghdad suspended, but only if Saddam let weapons inspectors back in his
country.

He also defended British and U.S. air patrols over northern and southern Iraq, saying they
were the only way of protecting Iraq's Kurdish and Shiite populations and preventing a
repeat of Saddam's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Hain was responding to a detailed and hard-hitting attack on British policy by Hans von
Sponeck, the former United Nations humanitarian coordinator in Baghdad.

Von Sponeck resigned last March. Like his predecessor Denis Halliday, he has become a
vocal critic of sanctions and wider Western policy.

He accused Hain of churning out "fabricated and self-serving disinformation" to keep
sanctions in place and exaggerating the threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

"The Hans von Sponecks of this world and many others...put themselves in the position of
becoming effective fellow travellers and apologists for the maintenance of the Iraqi regime's
brutal rule under Saddam Hussein," Hain said.

"They don't have a clear alternative and we do," he told BBC radio, pointing to a U.N.
Security Council resolution championed by Britain which offered Iraq a suspension of
sanctions six months after the return of arms inspectors to Iraq.

The resolution was supported by the United States but the other three permanent Security
Council members -- China, Russia and France -- abstained, reflecting the increasing
international pressure for a swifter end to the embargo.

Hain also defended the no-fly zones, where von Sponeck said 144 Iraqi civilians had been
killed and 446 wounded by U.S. and British pilots.

"If we just walked away from policing the southern no-fly zones -- or the northern one which
very few people suggest because Saddam Hussein would commit genocide on the Kurds --
what would prevent Saddam from again invading Kuwait?"

"What is to prevent him attacking from the air the Shiites, the marsh Arabs? That is the
question they have to answer. We don't just bomb for the hell of it."
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The Kurdistan Observer
www.kurdistanobserver.com