Features » March 6, 2006

Were Sanctions Worth the Price? (cont’d)

Iraq sanctions and their aftermath.

The problem, Joy Gordon says, was that U.S. policymakers refused to see the destitution caused by the sanctions as “a form of violence because it doesn’t look like violence to us. There’s a famous line by Woodrow Wilson,” she says, “as he’s describing the League of Nations’ use of boycotts as a response to aggression. He calls it a ‘peaceful, silent … deadly remedy.’ That’s what this was.”

————————————

But if the Iraq sanctions were a humanitarian and moral failure, viewed through a narrow enough lens, they were also a disarmament success. For the first time in history, multilateral sanctions helped open up a regime to international weapons inspectors, who succeeded in destroying a fairly extensive program to develop biological, chemical and nuclear weapons.

For George Lopez and David Cortright, this is the legacy of the Iraq sanctions that is important to preserve. With their tag-team style and easy rapport, Cortright and Lopez come across as the Laurel and Hardy of sanctions wonkery. Lopez is short, olive-complected and voluble, Cortright, taller, pale and reserved. Together they have written some 20 articles and five books about sanctions, given hours of testimony and presentations to diplomats and U.N. policymakers and authored guidelines for assessing the impact of sanctions that were subsequently adopted by the United Nations.

Both men work out of Notre Dame’s Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, which is dedicated to studying the “causes of violence and the conditions for sustainable peace.” For the pair, preserving sanctions as a viable option is part of a larger struggle to move the world toward an international governance system in which war is no longer an option, or at least, a very rare occurrence.

“What we’re seeing is the militarization of American foreign policy,” says Cortright with a hint of despair. He fears that if sanctions are discredited, we will “increasingly look to the military as a way to solve these problems.”

Lopez and Cortright argue that sanctions in Iraq were most effective in the first few years after the Gulf War, when Hussein reluctantly started complying with the terms of the cease-fire. “The Iraqis were saying: ‘If you get access to this, this and this, is there a chance the sanctions will come off?,’” says Lopez. “So the drive for Iraqi cooperation was partly fueled by wanting to get the sanctions untightened or lifted.”

But even with Iraq’s continued grudging acceptance of inspectors, and significant progress in exposing and destroying banned weapons, the United States blocked any movement at the United Nations to alter or loosen the sanctions. “[Iraq] had complied with four, five, six of the eight provisions” in the original U.N. resolution, Lopez says, “and they were getting no response on the other side.”

It was when Iraq realized that its compliance would bring no rewards that things began to deteriorate. In 1997, Clinton said sanctions would be maintained “until the end of time or as long as [Hussein] lasts,” and on October 31, 1998, he signed the Iraqi Liberation Act, which made “regime change” the official policy of the U.S. government. The same day, Iraq announced it would no longer cooperate with inspectors; the United States pulled them from the country and retaliated with bombing raids. Sanctions stayed on after 1998 as a putative inducement to let the inspectors back in, but with the United States openly endorsing regime change, it’s hard to see what Hussein had to gain from complying.

That said, Lopez and Cortright say the arrangement was still salvageable. The internationally coordinated effort to stop weapons from entering Iraq—a dragnet that was, we now know, essentially 100 percent effective—could have been de-linked from sanctions. “You could trade like crazy and simply focus on military means,” says Lopez. “That’s the system we advocated; the system we fought like crazy for.” They had some success. In 2001, the Bush administration pushed the United Nations to modify Oil-for-Food to allow more trade.

Even if all that is true, what about the humanitarian cost? I ask Cortright and Lopez a modified version of the infamous question to Albright: “Was it worth it?”

There’s silence. Cortight and Lopez both visibly squirm. They look at the table.

“We were less committed to the sanctions and more committed to the inspections,” says Lopez haltingly. “But we were convinced that the only thing that kept the inspections viable was to have the sanctions.” If the left had succeeded in ending sanctions, he says, you would have likely had a re-armed Iraq. “Then you’re in real trouble.” Ultimately, Lopez says, they could have gotten up on a “soap box” and condemned the sanctions, but it would have meant forfeiting their ability to influence high-level decision makers.

It strikes me, as I listen to this, that Lopez and Cortright faced the same kind of moral dilemma sanctions opponents like Kathy Kelly faced in Iraq. In hopes of mitigating suffering, they were forced to tacitly comply with a system that unquestionably produced it.

————————————

What, then, are the lessons? First, sanctions cannot be an indefinite means of “containment,” Lopez and Cortright say. They should only be imposed when there are clearly defined incentives and a willingness on the part of the parties to give and take. Second, and most importantly, comprehensive economic sanctions create such hardship for the innocent that they violate fundamental principles of justice. This is now a firm consensus within policy circles. “They were sui generis,” Lopez says of the Iraq sanctions. “It’s unlikely you’ll ever see something like that again.”

Not everyone got the memo: A week before I interviewed Lopez and Cortright, Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) introduced a resolution calling for Bush to impose comprehensive economic sanctions on Iran.

The future of sanctions, Lopez and Cortright contend, is “smart sanctions,” which promise the benefits without the humanitarian costs by aiming the restrictions at those at the top of the regime in question. “You lock down weapons imports,” says Lopez, freeze assets and restrict travel: “The general’s daughter now can’t go to Princeton.” Since Iraq, nearly all of the sanctions imposed by the United Nations have been of this ilk.

The results are mixed: In Yugoslavia they managed to get Milosevic to the bargaining table, and in Libya they were very effective in convincing Khadaffi to stop his pursuit of nuclear weapons. In Somalia, Liberia and Rwanda, they’ve been near-total failures.

Cortright and Lopez are confident that smart sanctions will grow more effective as they are more routinely applied, but Halliday is skeptical. “In theory you can focus on the wrongdoer,” he says, “curb their travel and their goodies and their imported Jaguars, or whatever they’re into, but in the case of a dictatorship, it doesn’t make a difference. It’s not going to really upset the apple-cart.”

But if sanctions of any kind shouldn’t ever be tried again, as Halliday and Kelly both argue, the only two responses to gross violations of international norms would seem to be war or inaction. Sanctions opponents are bracing in the moral clarity of their critique of sanctions, but their proposals for alternatives—more “dialogue” and development incentives—seem a touch anemic.

It’s clear, however, that the voices of Halliday and Kelly weigh heavily on Lopez and Cortright. In an op-ed they’re circulating about the impending Iran “crisis,” Lopez and Cortright caution U.S. policymakers that “overly forceful sanctions toward Iran might be counterproductive,” and stress that sanctions work best when they are combined with incentives. The spectre of Iraq looms large.

But their op-ed seems to miss the biggest lesson. No matter how high-minded or nuanced the policy may be, it will only produce good outcomes if the countries involved act in good faith. For more than a decade, both Iraq and the United States were fundamentally acting in bad faith. Hussein was so intent on deceiving the weapons inspectors that he refused to acknowledge he had been disarmed, even after he had been, while the United States had no intention of lifting the sanctions, even after Hussein was disarmed.

When discussing early opposition to sanctions, Lopez mentioned the American Friends Service Committee, one of the earliest groups to protest the policy. According to Lopez, they feared that sanctions would be a “trap-door for war. We economically strangle him and then he won’t cry uncle so we cut off his head.”

“Isn’t that exactly what happened?” I ask.

“That is what happened,” says Lopez. “But it didn’t have to.”

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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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