A UN official quit last week over the human cost in Iraq of sanctions.
US curbs cover half of the world
population.

Scott Peterson
Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
MONDAY, APRIL 3, 2000

http://www.csmonitor.com/durable/2000/04/03/fp1s1-csm.shtml

Amman, Jordan

Sanction fatigue is setting in.

This diplomatic stick, employed more times by President Clinton than
any other leader in US history, is
losing its effectiveness and appeal on the global stage.

High-profile failings of economic sanctions - especially in Iraq - are
casting doubt on the future of
sanctions as a means of punishment.

The paradox is that in the decades since Cuba was first embargoed in
1960, the
intended target of sanctions - whether it be Cuban President Fidel
Castro, Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein, or Serbia's President Slobodan Milosevic - has
been able to
turn sanctions to political advantage, while neatly handing off the
burden to local
populations.

The tangle of US sanctions today affect more than half the world's
population. But
the severity of Iraq's case has for the first time built up a
diplomatic head of steam
against sanctions for what the US sees as global wrongdoing.

The growing chorus of protest was capped by last Thursday's departure
from
Baghdad of Hans Von Sponeck, UN humanitarian chief, for Iraq. He
resigned
rather than preside over the further destruction of Iraq's social
fabric.

"Let's face it: Iraq is one of the few countries on our globe which is
regressing," said
the 32-year UN veteran, in his first interview since leaving Iraq. "I
have no doubt that history will say
that Iraq was forced to become the guinea pig for the experimentation
of a sanction methodology that
ultimately failed. We have to find a new approach."

Sanctions may be the modern equivalent of the military siege, in which
armies throughout history - from
the Romans surrounding the Masada (an ancient Jewish fortress in
Israel), to the Germans and Finnish
blockading Leningrad in World War II - sought to compel capitulation by
destroying the will to resist.

Roots of the American policy reach back to President Woodrow Wilson,
who said in 1919 that "a
nation boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender."

That maxim seems to have been taken to heart by President Clinton, for
whom sanctions have all but
replaced diplomacy. He has called the US "sanctions happy," and long
with Congress, he has been
responsible for imposing more than half of the 125 or so cases of
sanctions ever imposed by the US.

But such overuse "devalues the tool" and the "moral, disapproval value
tends to be lost," says Gary
Hufbauer, a sanctions expert and senior fellow at the Institute for
International Economics in
Washington. Economists estimate that sanctions cost Americans some $20
billion a year in lost export
sales, and up to 200,000 jobs.

The lessons of nearly 10 years of sanctions on Iraq are causing
analysts to reexamine their
assumptions about what few sanctions - out of the 176 recorded cases
this century - have caused their
targets to change course, and why so many have failed.

"We've done a lot of re-evaluating," Mr. Hufbauer says. "The
unfortunate truth is that when you have
a truly retrograde regime, and you are seeking a major goal like its
overthrow, the record is close to
zero."

Sanctions have been applied from North Korea to Canada, and both India
and Pakistan were slapped
with sanctions - mandatory under US law - when they tested nuclear
devices in 1998. Those sanctions
hurt US farm exports badly, renewing interest in Congress for reform
that would require assessing
domestic impact before imposing any sanction.

Despite those cases, Iraq stands out. "Iraq in our times, is like the
Italian-Abyssinia case was to the
League of Nations. That was the defining sanction, and it did as much
as anything to destroy the
League," says Hufbauer. "The Iraq case is not going to destroy the UN,
but it is certainly causing a lot
of rethinking. The lasting impact is that it will be much harder to put
these kind of sanctions on any
country."

A similar analysis has been put forward by a Brittish parliamentary
committee, that found that the Iraq
example showed it would be "difficult" to justify imposing similar
sanctions on any nation in the future,
because they cause "impoverishment" and "only further concentrate power
in the hands of the ruling
elite."

Comprehensive UN sanctions were slapped on Iraq in August 1990, just
days after Iraqi forces
invaded Kuwait - and remain the pillar of US policy toward Iraq. Since
1996, Iraq has been permitted
to sell oil to buy humanitarian goods, but US officials have blocked
scores of contracts, anxious that
"dual use" items might be used to reinvigorate Iraq's nuclear-,
chemical-, and biological-weapons
programs.

The US has come under intense pressure from friend and foe alike the
past two weeks in the UN
Security Council. In a rare moment of criticism, UN head Kofi Annan
noted that sanctions had created
a "serious moral dilemma" for the UN, and that the US and Britain had
blocked more than $1.5 billion
worth of humanitarian contracts for Iraq - for items from breeding
bulls to ambulances.

"The UN has been on the side of the vulnerable and the weak, and has
always sought to relieve
suffering. Yet, here we are accused of causing suffering," Mr. Annan
said.

Senior US officials have said repeatedly that the Iraqi people are not
the targets of sanctions, and have
agreed to release at least 70 of the applications for humanitarian
goods that it had put on hold. "There is
no question that sanctions fatigue is becoming a major problem," says
Anthony Cordesman, a leading
Mideast security expert at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies in Washington. "There is
immense hardship in Iraq.... You certainly have a nation that is
falling apart in every way - except in
sustaining a dictatorship."

"The idea that we are engaged in a constant battle for perceptions, and
that the key perception is the
welfare of the Iraqi people, seems to be absolutely beyond the
comprehension of the State
Department," Mr. Cordesman says. "If you look back on [Secretary of
State] Madeleine Albright's
tenure, this will probably be recognized as one of the greatest single
failures for which she has to be
held responsible."

Oil-rich Iraq was once one of the wealthiest nations in the Mideast.
But a decade of war in the 1980s,
the 1991 Gulf War, and then sanctions have all resulted in a spike in
extreme malnutrition rates. Child
deaths now number in the hundreds of thousands, and there has been an
almost total breakdown of
health and other basic services, according to UN statistics.

Mr. Von Sponeck points out that the Iraqi leadership has spent the $400
million a year from illicit
smuggling of oil on everything from new palaces to whiskey, and he is
disappointed at how little it
spends from legal UN oil money on education.

"I don't say that everything that impinges on Iraq is due to sanctions.
Rubbish," he says. "But the
accusation that the regime is purposefully trying to make the Iraqi
people suffer doesn't hold."

"Governments are changing their attitudes to the Iraq file," says Von
Sponeck. "The big question is:
Can that pressure translate into swaying the very inflexible positions
of the Americans and British?
This has become a moral issue."

Iraq should be proof that sanctions just don't work, he adds.
Apartheid-era sanctions on South Africa
are often a case that is raised by supporters of sanctions as a case
that worked, but Von Sponeck was
head of the UN in neighboring Botswana at the time, and disagrees.

"People forget that the sanctions period was short, and the first
victims were the blacks in South
Africa," he says.

Pope John Paul II helped set the tone during his 1998 visit to Cuba -
where four decades of sanctions
have failed to unseat Mr. Castro - saying that sanctions are "always
deplorable, because they hurt the
most needy."

The transformation in Von Sponeck's thinking is an apt mirror of that
taking place elsewhere. When he
first arrived in Iraq, "the word 'sanctions' was like a cow in India -
it was very holy: don't talk about it,"
he says. But his "mental adjustment" was prompted by the situation in
Iraqi schools, where children
were learning in such isolation - printed materials have been forbidden
under sanctions - that they can
never be "responsible citizens."

"The biggest lesson of the last 10 years," Hufbauer says, is that
"sometimes sanctions are successful
when you have modest goals and an open regime. But sanctions are a
fair-weather tool of diplomacy.
You can't expect them to do the heavy lifting, just as you wouldn't
send in a crew with shovels to dig
out a major road through rock."