Undiplomatic Dispatch: Iraq Sanctions Are Nasty, and They Don't Work

TIME.com's Tony Karon launches a new weekly column by asking just what
Washington hopes to achieve with sanctions  that hurt Iraqis but not Saddam

We may wince or cluck when civilians die in the course of a war we support,
but most of us keep our eyes on the prize  and accept the "collateral
damage." There's no way to make the proverbial omelet, after all, without
breaking a few  eggs.
That seemed to be the logic of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright when
she told "60 Minutes" in 1998 that even if  sanctions against Iraq cause the
death of half a million Iraqi children, "the price is worth it."

But what is "it," exactly? In the face of such a human toll, it behooves us
to ask just what kind of omelet Secretary  Albright and her boss are
creating with this recipe.

On the eve of the 10th anniversary of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait,
there's growing concern both in the U.S.  and abroad that continued
sanctions are not only causing terrible suffering among Saddam's luckless
subjects, but  have also failed miserably as a strategy to bring down his
unlovely regime.

Despite nine years of sanctions, Saddam is doing pretty nicely, thank you.
His grip on power is stronger than ever;  he and his cohorts grow rich
smuggling goods from Jordan to beat the economic embargo; and the sanctions
policy of  his worst enemies - the U.S. and Britain - are today the subject
of greater Arab hostility than his own odious  regime. Sanctions haven't
exactly crippled Saddam, but they've put the Iraqi people through hell.

Albright insists that Iraqis are suffering not because of sanctions, but
because of the policies of their leader.  Saddam is certainly cynically
exploiting the propaganda value of sanctions, funneling precious resources
into the  armed forces that keep him in power, and playing for sympathy in
the hope of ending sanctions while conceding as  little as possible on his
weapons programs. But there's no denying that those sanctions have
occasioned a precipitous  decline in Iraqi living standards and an alarming
rise in the death rate. The country that, 10 years ago, had one of  the
lowest infant mortality rates in the world now has one of the highest.
Sanctions not only cripple Iraq's economy,  they also block access to many
critical lifesaving medicines on the grounds that these could supposedly be
used in a  biological warfare program.

In 1998, the coordinator of the U.N.'s oil-for-food program in Iraq resigned
in protest against continuing sanctions.  "We are in the process of
destroying an entire society," warned Irishman Denis Halliday. "It's as
simple and  terrifying as that.... Five thousand children are dying every
month."

It's worth asking what exactly these sanctions are designed to achieve. It's
no secret, of course, that Washington's  objective in keeping them in place
is to overthrow Saddam, but Washington's not allowed to say so because these
are  U.N. sanctions, and the international body isn't in the business of
overthrowing governments.

Instead, the legal basis for the sanctions - which Washington can keep in
place via its veto power at the U.N. - is  that Iraq has not been certified
as compliant with its undertakings on weapons of mass destruction. Of
course, there  have been no U.N. inspectors in Iraq since they were
withdrawn before the air strikes in late 1998. But without  inspectors,
Iraq's compliance can't be certified, even though former Marine captain
Scott Ritter, who as a U.N. arms  inspector was at the center of the 1997
showdown in Baghdad, insists that Iraq currently has no capacity to threaten
anyone with weapons of mass destruction. In other words, sanctions have long
since served their original purpose of  blunting Saddam's ability to bully
his neighbors.

President Clinton surely hoped that sanctions and cruise missiles would have
long ago dispatched Saddam to the  garbage pail of history, but now he has
to digest the irksome reality that the Iraqi dictator is likely to survive
his own administration. The culprit here may be Clinton himself, because his
administration has conspicuously failed  to formulate a viable Iraq policy.
Back in 1991, President Bush held back from destroying Saddam's regime out
of  concern for regional stability. The collapse of the ethnic-minority
regime in Baghdad would almost certainly cause  the Shiite majority in the
south to ally with Iran, and it would also prompt the Kurds in the north to
create their  own state, which Turkey would be unlikely to tolerate.

But sanctions do not a policy make; they're a holding pattern. And by simply
keeping them in place, the Clinton  administration ducked out of formulating
a viable Iraq policy, as Saddam shored up his power while relegating most of
his countrymen to a grueling struggle for survival that banishes all
thoughts of rebellion. From a strategic point of  view, the "Iraqi
opposition" for which Congress has earmarked $100 million is a fantasy, and
there's a growing fear  that the damage wrought by sanctions to Iraq's
social fabric may have condemned the country to decades more of  despotism.
Even if Saddam were miraculously overthrown, it's extremely unlikely to be
by a Jeffersonian democrat. And  a decade of sanctions hasn't exactly
fostered enthusiasm for the West among ordinary Iraqis.

So while the sanctions program continues to do a booming trade in
"collateral damage," it doesn't appear to be doing  Iraq - or the U.S., or
anyone else, for that matter - any good. And nor is it likely to any time
soon.