Olympic Reprieve

Iraq is allowed to send two athletes to the Beijing Games by a bureaucracy that singled it out for punishment.

THE INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee partly reversed its ban on Iraq yesterday, grudgingly allowing two of the country's seven athletes to enter the upcoming Games in Beijing. The concession, an IOC spokesman said, was based on a promise by the Iraqi government to resolve a dispute over its national Olympic committee by holding free elections for its members under IOC observation. The eleventh-hour reprieve is good news for the two track and field competitors, including 21-year-old sprinter Dana Hussein Abdul Razzaq, the only woman on Iraq's team. But it's difficult to accept that five other Iraqi athletes, including would-be competitors in archery, judo, rowing and weightlifting, remain banned by bureaucratic fiat -- and even harder to stomach is the IOC's pretense of enforcing impartial rules and democratic principles.

Iraq's Olympic troubles were partly caused by the ham-handed way in which its government replaced its Olympic committee, which was devastated by a mass kidnapping. But the squabble mostly reflects the vindictive behavior of an international bureaucracy that has singled out one country for zealous enforcement of regulations that it ignores in police states throughout the world -- starting with this year's host, China. The IOC's Belgian president, Jacques Rogge, has allowed Beijing to skirt its pledges on media freedom and tolerated a pre-Games crackdown on dissent. Yet his administration has gone out of its way to impose the letter of the rulebook on fragile, war-torn Iraq -- even though its Olympic committee, however flawed, is a vast improvement on the one that was headed by Uday Hussein, Saddam's sadistic son.

Mind you, we're all in favor of injecting democracy into the Olympic movement. We look forward to the IOC's demand that North Korea and Cuba eliminate government influence over their Olympic programs and hold free elections for new Olympic committees. Iraq, of course, does not have an IOC delegate, and its principal supporter, the United States, does not hold a seat on the governing executive committee -- though Puerto Rico has one. The U.S. was voted off two years ago, during the same meeting at which the IOC decided to drop American-favored baseball and softball as Olympic sports.

Could the IOC's persecution of Iraq have something to do with the committee's conspicuous anti-Americanism? Maybe not. But perhaps this would be a good time for American sports authorities to ask why an institution largely funded by U.S. companies has become so intent on embarrassing the United States and its allies.