Features » March 6, 2006

Were Sanctions Worth the Price?

As conflict with Iran looms, questions remain about the moral implications of sanctions

By Christopher Hayes

Iraq sanctions and their aftermath.

As he makes the rounds promoting his memoir and attempting to distance himself from the failures of the Iraq occupation, Paul Bremer consistently offers the same excuse. “I have to say I was surprised by … how run down the economy was,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross in January. “I found a situation that was quite a bit more difficult than I had anticipated.”

If honest, this is a shocking admission. The reason Iraq’s economy was “run down” and its infrastructure decimated has more than a little to do with a massive American bombing campaign during the first Gulf War, followed by 13 years of the most comprehensive sanctions in the history of the United Nations. Bremer’s “surprise” at Iraq’s devastation is like a Union general arriving in Atlanta after Sherman and expressing shock that the place had been torched.

Bremer’s not alone in his amnesia: With the war and occupation front-and-center, the sanctions era has been relegated to a historical footnote. But we haven’t heard the last of sanctions. Recently, a growing chorus of pundits and politicians has called for sanctions against Iran. With the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty unraveling before our eyes and preemptive war discredited, sanctions seem the only viable means of deterring regimes that seek nuclear weapons or engage in gross human rights violations.

And yet it’s easy to forget that in the waning days of the Clinton era and early Bush years, the sanctions in Iraq had increasingly few supporters. As sanctions experts David Cortright and George Lopez noted in a 2004 article in Foreign Affairs, the sanctions regime was “dismissed by hawks as weak and ineffective and reviled by the left for its humanitarian costs.”

The Iraq war changed all that. From the New York Times editorial board to Senator John Kerry, many now argue that by forcing inspections that successfully dismantled Iraq’s weapons programs, sanctions achieved U.S. policy goals without the need for an expensive and bloody war. In other words, to quote the title of Lopez and Cortright’s article, “Sanctions Worked.”

But the sanctions also caused widespread misery and death. Before possibly repeating the same mistakes, it makes sense to get a better handle on the legacy of the Iraq sanctions. Did sanctions successfully disarm Saddam Hussein “non-violently” as many now say, or did they create a humanitarian abomination of epic proportions?

Or: did they do both?

————————————

The idea of using economic blockades as a tool of coercion is as old as warfare itself, but the modern concept of sanctions as an alternative to war didn’t come about until after World War I and the League of Nations. The idea was later enshrined in Chapter 7 of the U.N. Charter, which authorizes the Security Council to respond to “breaches of the peace” with “complete or partial interruption of economic relations.”

For the next 40 years, Cold War paralysis in the Security Council meant that multilateral U.N. sanctions were rarely used, with two exceptions: Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977. Though more limited in scope than those later imposed on Iraq, these sanctions undoubtedly helped to bring down the apartheid regime and were widely viewed as a triumph for the international community.

“South Africa was the paradigm,” says Joy Gordon, a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University who has written extensively on sanctions. “They were seen as both peaceful and effective.”

Then came Iraq.

By the time Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, the deadlock on the Security Council had crumbled along with the Berlin Wall. In response to Iraq’s aggression, the U.N. Security Council passed Resolution 661 requiring member states to cease all imports from or exports to Iraq. When the sanctions failed to induce Hussein’s withdrawal, the United States launched Operation Desert Storm and forced his retreat. After the Gulf War, the United Nations maintained the sanctions (now modified under Resolution 687), in order to force Iraq’s compliance with weapons inspectors and the other conditions of the ceasefire. They were not meant to be indefinite.

After five years of sanctions, a rising tide of U.N. officials, along with U.S. and European activists, began calling attention to the policy’s catastrophic effects on the people of Iraq. In 1996, general sanctions morphed into the Oil-For-Food Program. The program allowed the Iraqi government to sell limited amounts of oil and use the proceeds to pay contractors to bring in food and humanitarian goods. The council, however, still blocked anything that qualified as “dual use” goods—items that could conceivably be used in a banned weapons program. These could include everything from water tankers to vaccines.

To articulate the full scope of the resulting humanitarian disaster is a tall order; there have been hundreds of conflicting reports, and numbers are disputed. But one thing is clear: hundreds of thousands of Iraqis suffered and died due to sanctions.

Consider the economic toll alone. Prior to the sanctions, 60 percent of Iraq’s GDP came from oil exports, which meant that an export ban immediately reduced the country’s economy by more than half. To put this in perspective, in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, U.S. GDP had fallen only 27 percent from its pre-depression levels. A study published in 2005 estimated that by 1993, three years into the sanctions, real per capita GDP in Iraq—adjusted by real value of the Iraqi dinar—had fallen by 98 percent, from $718 in 1990 to just $13

The economic effects were amplified by the widespread bombing during the first Gulf War, when over 90,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Iraq and Kuwait. Many of these bombs hit electricity facilities and water treatment plants. A declassified 1991 U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency document titled “Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities” accurately predicted the combined effects of bombing and sanctions: “With no domestic sources of both water treatment replacement parts and some essential chemicals, Iraq will continue attempts to circumvent United Nations sanctions,” it read. “Failing to secure supplies will result in a shortage of pure drinking water for much of the population. This could lead to increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease.”

Indeed, between 1990 and 1994, the incidence of typhoid went from 11.3 to 142 per 100,000 and cholera grew from zero cases to 7.8 per 100,000.

————————————

Though the sanctions stirred up much public debate in Europe and outrage across the Arab world, they received relatively little attention in the United States—until a small number of religious activists, most notably the Chicago-based Voices in the Wilderness (now Voices for Creative Non Violence), started publicly protesting the havoc wreaked by America’s policies.

Voices was not met with a warm reception. The U.S. government prosecuted the group for violating the sanctions (by bringing banned items like aspirin into Iraq), ultimately levying a $20,000 fine. In the press, Voices was generally portrayed as either foolish do-gooders or outright apologists for the Baathist regime. “I know people said we were dupes and useful idiots,” Voices founder Kathy Kelly says wearily, “It’s a sad thing to me. If you wait till you’re perfect, you’ll never get anything done. I know that our project was inherently flawed from the beginning because we couldn’t go and do a demonstration in front of Saddam’s palace,” she says in reference to Hussein’s horrific crackdowns on dissidents. “We quickly would have endangered other people.”

Kelly is attractive and intense, with a bounty of grey-brown curls and clear, penetrating eyes. A longtime member of the Catholic Worker movement, she and others were galvanized into action in 1995, when the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) published a study in the British medical journal Lancet estimating that as many as 576,000 children had died as a result of the sanctions. “We realized that if we are not doing anything about this, it’s unlikely that anybody else is,” she says.

The FAO casualty estimate became a kind of rallying cry for sanctions opponents, and was forever immortalized in 1996, when “60 Minutes” asked then-U.N. ambassador Madeline Albright about the death toll of 500,000 children. She responded: “I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”

Later studies would critique the methodology of the FAO report, but even a conservative analysis of the child morbidity and mortality rate in Iraq, published by public health and sanctions expert Richard Garfield, came up with a likely estimate of 350,000 dead children.

The bulk of these casualties came before the switch to “oil-for-food,” which led to a dramatic decrease in malnutrition and a doubling of food intake. But even after the most abject humanitarian crisis was relieved, sanctions still enforced widespread social misery. “I would say sanctions made Saddam Hussein stronger, not weaker,” says Denis Halliday, a former U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator in Iraq. “They demolished any political opposition. Middle class professionals were so busy trying to make a living or keeping their kids alive, they had no interest in changing the system.”

After 13 months overseeing the Oil-for-Food program, Halliday quit in protest, eventually calling the United Nations policy “genocide.” He was succeeded by Hans Von Sponeck, who lasted two years before he, too, quit in disgust.

When sanctions supporters could no longer deny its disastrous impact, they blamed Iraqis’ suffering on Saddam Hussein. “If any child is without food, or medicine or a roof over his or her head in Iraq,” Bill Clinton told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! in 2000, it was because Saddam was “sticking it to his own children.”

There’s no question that Hussein exploited and exacerbated the suffering of Iraqis during the sanctions regime. But if the sanctions gave Hussein a pretext for cruelty and abuse, it’s hard to see how that counts as a point in the sanctions’ favor: “It’s as if the United States said ‘We don’t like Saddam, let’s starve the poor Iraqis,’ ” says Richard Garfield. “And Saddam said: ‘That’s my job. You want to starve, I’ll show you starving.’ “ 

Even with Hussein bilking the United Nations and underfunding crucial health and welfare services, it’s impossible to ascribe the totality of Iraq’s misery under the sanctions to Hussein’s treachery. For example, a much-publicized recent report on Oil-for-Food abuses estimated that the regime had skimmed as much $10 billion dollars in kick-backs. But in 2003 the World Bank estimated that just rebuilding Iraq’s basic infrastructure would cost $55 billion dollars.

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• Reader Comments

  The issue of “acting in good faith” seems to be the core of the sanctions debate.  Clearly neither side excersized good faith in negotiating: for Saddam it was a tool to gain greater sympathy and control of his populace through broad nationalist appeals, while for the US it was a convenient, politically safe holding pattern that promised the temporary containment of the Ba’athist Regime in Baghdad.  Neither side could long sustain his position based on the sanctions arrangements!

  Clearly, the sanctions hurt the Iraqi people more than the Ba’athist elite and Saddam.  This really didn’t bother the US political elite since ultimately the Iraq people and their society were as much a target of sanctions and the US empire as were the Ba’athists and their leader.  The utter de-industrialization of Iraqi society, the destruction and decay of its modern infrastructure, and the denuding and impovershment of its skilled and well endowed middle classes left Iraq society open in the post-invasion aftermath to US imperialist conquest, restructuring, and outright pillage.  The “reconstruction” effort, which has had very little developmental or humanitarian effect, has been almost 100% focused on the oil industry which has been protected, rebuilt, and operational at full or near full capacity since mid-2003.  Billions were committed to this effort as well as to the US corporate takeover of almost every aspect of the Iraqi economy over the last three years.  Like sanctions, this story is also well known. 

  A small bit of research will show that the 100 Bremer Orders, named for the US official interviewed by Terry Gross of NPR, opened up ALL aspects of the Iraqi economy to foreign takeover including the vital Port of Umm Qasr in the south, to the many thousands of seed varieties produced by generations of Iraqi grain farmers and now coveted by such agribusiness giants as Monsanto through the extreme and intrusive patenting laws enacted by Bremer and the now defunct CPA.  Even the new Iraqi currency was minted by De Le Rue, a subsidiary of the Carlisle Group!

  The further denationalization of Iraqi society and government through its new constitution which allows for regionalization by a popular referendum is an old British colonail divide and rule tactic and is rightly resisted by the Sunni militias and others.  US imperial manipulation of current Iraqi society to US corporate advantage for the purposes of globalizing Iraq society through US corporate control is the real purpose of the war.  Such will be financed by lush oil revenues which will issue from an Iraqi oil industry now divided into the North oil company in Kurdistan and the South oil campany in the Shi’ite South through lon-term production sharing arrangements with US oil majors.  The entire imperial take-over process, however, began with the emasculation of Iraqi society through destructive international UN sanctions.

  Posted by cabdriverinchicago on Mar 6, 2006 at 6:28 PM

  Christopher Hayes has done a commendable job of identifying the real factors at work in Iraq during the period between the hostilities.  A good example is his pointing out that the FAO child death rates, as detailed in the journal Lancet, were flawed.  In fact, child mortality figures improved in Kurdistan, where the Kurds were under the protection of the UN, and the Oil-for-Food benefits went directly to the Kurdish people, as opposed to being squandered by Saddam.

  M. Hayes, having gotten some of the facts more or less correct while neglecting others, then fails in his analysis of those facts, as leftists are wont to do. 

  But the sanctions also caused widespread misery and death. 

  Ummm, no.

  The sanctions, as detailed in the seventeen UNSC Resolutions, required Saddam to do three things: stop making aggressive war, stop terrorizing the Iraqi people, and identify and surrender his WMD.  Surely these are commendable goals.  Saddam was specifically forbidden to move or destroy WMD except under UN supervision.  The fact that the WMD are not in Iraq (they probably went to Syria and Lebanon, and could be in Russia by now) automatically means that Saddam was in violation of the sanctions.  Not to mention his ongoing murder of Iraqi civilians, attacks on UN forces, and threats against Kuwait. 

  Humanitarian concerns for the Iraqi people in 1991 required a partial lifting of the embargo, allowing a limited amount of oil to be sold for food and medicine for the Iraqi populace.  (UN Resolution 712, September 19, 1991.)  Saddam refused the terms of Resolution 712, and the embargo continued.  In 1996, Saddam finally agreed to the UN Oil-for-Food Program, and funds for food and medicine became available in 1997.

  http://www. pbs.org/ frontlineworld/ stories/iraq/ sanctions.html

  http://www. un.org/ News/ossg/ iraq.htm

  So, immediately after Gulf I, Iraq was offered the opportunity to sell oil for food and medicine.  Saddam refused.  When Saddam finally agreed to Oil-for-Food, five years later, he immediately transformed it into the world’s biggest scam, with the eager and able assistance of the UN leadership, France, Russia, and many other countries.  Oil money that was intended for the well being of the people of Iraq instead went to Saddam’s weapons, Saddam’s golden palaces, Mad Jacques Chirac’s campaign funds, and Vladimir Putins’s political party. 

  Did sanctions successfully disarm Saddam Hussein “non-violently” as many now say, or did they create a humanitarian abomination of epic proportions?

  Or: did they do both?

  Or, did they do neither?  Neither is the correct answer.  The final Duelfer report on the WMD specifically stated that Saddam had kept his WMD knowledge and infrastructure intact against the day that he could resume weapons production.  Intelligence now being recovered from Saddam’s files indicates that he kept working on WMD, and Iraqi Ba’athist authorities have detailed how the WMD were shipped to Syria by air under the pretense of flood relief.  And the “humanitarian abomination” was the direct result of Saddam’s initial refusal to accept humanitarian relief and, when Oil-for-Food was finally accepted, Saddam stole much of the money for weapons, palaces, bribes, kickbacks, and extortion payments. 

  Continue ...

  Posted by scorp on Mar 7, 2006 at 4:46 AM

  Leftists, when confronted with a murderer, typically waste time trying to evaluate and understand the murderer, and try to blame the dead bodies on anyone or anything except the person who pulled the trigger.  So I suppose it should come as no surprise that M. Hayes questions if the UN sanctions would “create a humanitarian abomination of epic proportions”.  This is nonsense, of course.  Saddam was a humanitarian abomination, a mass murderer, a rapist, a thief, and started two aggressive wars, besides depriving the Iraqi people of food and medicine.  That should not be too difficult to understand, unless you are a leftist. 

  Saddam “caused widespread misery and death” by misusing the Oil-for-Food program, just as he started the Iran-Iraq War (one million dead), the Kuwait War, and executed 300,000 - 400,000 Iraqis found in mass graves in Iraq after he was deposed.

  Posted by scorp on Mar 7, 2006 at 4:46 AM

  All aspects of weapons trade, whether conventional or non-conventional, would be suitable to forbid from a government or rebel group that is a threat to its neighbors and/or fellow citizens. I mean, not a single thing connected to any aspect of killing technology. Spare parts for aircraft, military vehicle tires, ammunition, cartridge belts, gun oil, etc etc, absolutely anything in that vein.

  Even aside from questions of sanctions against offensive powers, the trade in weapons, most especially the run-of-the-mill conventional arms that no one seems concerned about any more (but that are the main tools used by murderous and internationally dangerous powers), ought to be examined, both from a moral and a practical standpoint.

  As though morality and practicality were high priorities in statecraft! The evidence does not suggest it.

  The obvious thing needed for this approach to succeed, of course, would be the hardest thing to achieve. That would be seamless international backing of the embargo, instead of what is more likely: some few countries would refuse to traffic weapons to the offending power, while others would see an opportunity to feather their own nests by becoming the alternate suppliers. This in spite of the likelihood that the weapons sold to those powers could very well be stockpiled and turned against those who sold them in the first place, when sanctions are judged to have failed and the military option put into play.

  Posted by Kuya on Mar 7, 2006 at 6:32 AM

  The question of morality might look different if a slightly broader perspective was taken.

  I remember examining some of the better data available on this before the beginning of the Irak war.  What I remember is:

  1) Oil-for-Food worked:  yes, it did enrich Saddam and pay for a few more palaces, but child mortality started dropping after it took full effect.  The real question that I’ve seen nobody answer (or ask) is how those post-1996 statistics compare with the current child mortality in Iraq, post-invasion.  Or is it that nobody is even able to gather such data in the current context?

  2) as seen from sub-Saharan Africa, the “tragedy” of child mortality in sanctions-afflicted Irak was rather relative:  as I recall it, there were one or two (or more?) African countries that were part of the UN Security Council voting on invasion-authorizing resolution in early 2003 and these countries had child mortality rates on par with the Irak child mortality peak in the sanctions era.  Or worse.  (In fact, I think the numbers were so poorly known for these country that the numbers available were far less precise than those for Iraq.)

  While this does not change the questionable morality of sanctions, it points to where some of the West’s moral indignation should look from time to time.

  Posted by J-Lo on Mar 7, 2006 at 7:27 AM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 46 posts.

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