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We
need to think through the impact of
sanctions
By
Jonathan
Power
February 6, 2004
LONDON - If it is time to review the procedures
that persuaded President George Bush and Prime Minister
Tony Blair that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction then it is surely time overdue to examine the
impact of sanctions. The assumption seems to be that they
are a good thing, a softening up of the enemy before war
in some cases, as with Iraq and Serbia, and even an
alternative to war in others, as with Iran, Libya and
Cuba. But, frankly, we are in a muddle about the worth of
sanctions. They didn't appear to work with Saddam
Hussein.
After Iraq President Woodrow Wilson, when trying to
sell America the League of Nations, argued that sanctions
were better than war: "A nation that is boycotted is a
nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this
economic, peaceful, silent, deadly, remedy and there will
be no need for force". Yet, seemingly
paradoxically, Wilson was the one who opposed the allies'
post World War 1 sanctions on a defeated Germany,
maintaining rightly that such harsh and extreme
treatment- including exorbitant reparations- would
backfire, producing unemployment, bitterness and
resentment.
Some observers picking up this argument take it
further- sanctions against Mussolini clearly didn't work
after Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. But we now know
that Mussolini confided to Hitler that if oil had been
included in the embargo he would have had to withdraw in
a week. This seems to make sense: if rhetoric is strong
but action is weak, they can make things worse. Emperor
Haile Selassie bitterly complained that sanctions seemed
to have encouraged Italy to use poison gas to hasten the
conquest. But if the sanctions are as strong as the
rhetoric they may be effective, as with South Africa in
the end, albeit after many years. This seems to be the
case today with Libya.
Still, this doesn't make a watertight case. We can now
see clearly with Iraq the ambiguity of sanctions. On the
one hand they clearly made it very difficult for Saddam
Hussein to import the materials he needed to continue
with his work on weapons of mass destruction or to
rebuild his military after his first defeat. On the other
hand they helped solidify public opinion behind him
because of the heavy toll they took on ordinary people-
one estimate by UNICEF claims that half a million
children died unnecessary deaths as a result.
Serbia is another case in point. The wars in the
former Yugoslavia are rooted in large part in the
economic crisis of 1979-1989 when the country was
scissored between its need to repay its big foreign debt
and its attempt after Tito's death to create a market
economy. Unemployment, hyperinflation and a drastic fall
in living standards, combined with bitter conflicts over
federal and republican budgets, were the catalyst for
political disintegration. Economic sanctions merely
worsened the problems that helped trigger the civil
wars.
Sanctions required the Serbian government to reimpose
state monopolies. Sanctions also gave new life to the
police and army, whose numbers before had been reduced.
President Slobodan Milosevic's personal authority was
enhanced because it was he who could determine which
enterprises received subsidies, which workers would be
unemployed and which pensions would be paid.
Imposing sanctions is one disputed tool. Removing them
is another. Clearly with Libya, Muammar el-Qaddafi's
decision to compensate the victims of the air crashes his
regime had engineered and to give up research on nuclear
weapons was motivated by an unambiguous carrot- the
removal of sanctions and the fulsome recognition of his
regime if he keeps his side of the bargain. In contrast,
Saddam Hussein was never offered a carrot. Through both
Republican and Democratic administrations the U.S. was
quite firm- it demanded the demise of Saddam Hussein
before sanctions would be lifted. At the same time the
Americans and the British insisted on keeping the
sanctions screw tight, even making it difficult for
medicines and equipment to be shipped to Iraqi hospitals.
If the U.S. and the U.K. had kept a narrow focus on
armaments' sanctions and loosened up on everything else,
as well as not demanding Saddam's head on a plate, they
could have probably persuaded Saddam years ago to allow
the re-entry of UN arms inspectors and an unnecessary war
might have been avoided.
Similarly with North Korea, if the
Republican-controlled Congress had not prohibited the
Clinton Administration from carrying out its side of the
landmark agreement of 1994 to end economic sanctions it
may well have been that Pyongyang would have kept its
side of the grand bargain- to end its nuclear weapons'
programne.
Sanctions need subtlety if they are to find the weak
links in an antagonist's defenses and they have to be
joined with incentives so as not to be counterproductive.
In the world we now live in, we have to study war a
little less and sanctions rather more.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2004 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
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