Well so far, I've read the free preview to the FA article
Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked
George A. Lopez and David Cortright
...and I don't feel particularly inspired to pay for the rest of it. The entire argument seems to be that sanctions were supposed to squeeze Saddam's money and inderdict materials for his WMD programs and get rid of his WMD stocks; we entered Iraq and found a depleted military and no WMD stocks or active programs; ergo, sanctions worked great.
There are just a few obvious points wrong with this rosy picture.
First, as we now know, the UN sanctions did the world's worst job of squeezing Saddam's money, allowing him to skim billions off the top by the easy expedient of starving the Iraqis, which was no skin off his nose. However, it was a double whammy for us; it gave Saddam lots of dough to buy toys with, and gave us a huge recurring propaganda black eye - the US kills Iraqi babies! running for 10 years and more.
Second, (and one would really have thought obviously) there were no inspections going on from 1998 to 2003. Inspections resumed no thanks to sanctions, but thanks to a Coalition army in Kuwait. That army was not part of "sanctions". During that time, Saddam had the money and the ability to continue acquiring WMDs, and he sure acted like he was doing just that. Evidence of compliance with any of the 17 UN resolutions is remarkably thin on the ground, and Saddam had a long record of surreptitious weapons programs by that time - remember all the programs that Hussein Kamel told the Jordanians about when he defected in 1995. If Saddam dumped his stocks at some later time, it was for his own reasons, "sanctions" clearly didn't make him do it. If sanctions had made him do any part of it, he would have tried to display coopeation to get the sanctions lifted, and he most certainly did not display cooperation.
So they are really left with their initial point - sanctions prevented Saddam from rebuilding his army enough to make it a conventional threat. Okay, I think everybody grants this point, though even there I would argue that "sanctions" didn't keep him from attacking the Kurds (indeed, he did attack the Kurds several times during this period in a minor way), but the US patrolling the no-fly zones, which were also not part of "sanctions".
However, especially after 9/11, American planners were worried about Saddam as an unconventional, not a conventional threat, and sanctions had done nothing to make him seem contained on this score. |
