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Foreign Affairs
Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked
By George A. Lopez and David Cortright
George A. Lopez is Director of Policy Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. David Cortright is President of the Fourth Freedom Forum and Research Fellow at the Kroc Institute.
Success Disregarded
The Bush administration’s primary justification for going to war against Iraq last year was the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. But almost as soon as U.S. forces took Baghdad, it became clear that this fear was based on bad intelligence and faulty assumptions. Since then, the failure to find WMD in Iraq has caused a furor.
Sympathetic analysts argue that Washington had no way of knowing how serious the threat of Iraqi WMD was, so intelligence agencies provided the administration with a wide–ranging set of estimates. In the post–September 11 security environment, the argument goes, the Bush administration had little choice but to assume the worst. Critics charge that the White House inflated and manipulated weak, ambiguous intelligence to paint Iraq as an urgent threat and thus make an optional war seem necessary. A recent report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, for example, found not only that the intelligence community had overestimated Iraqi chemical and biological weapons capabilities but also that administration officials “systematically misrepresented” the threat posed by Iraqi weapons.
Public debate has focused on the question of what went wrong with U.S. intelligence. Given the deteriorated state of Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs and conventional military capabilities, this is only appropriate. But missing from the discussion is an equally important question: What went right with U.S. policy toward Iraq between 1990 and 2003? On the way to their misjudgments, it now appears, intelligence agencies and policymakers disregarded considerable evidence of the destruction and deterioration of Iraq’s weapons programs, the result of a successful strategy of containment in place for a dozen years. They consistently ignored volumes of data about the impact of sanctions and inspections on Iraq’s military strength.
The United Nations sanctions that began in August 1990 were the longest running, most comprehensive, and most controversial in the history of the world body. Most analysts argued prior to the Iraq war—and, in many cases, continue to argue—that sanctions were a failure. In reality, however, the system of containment that sanctions cemented did much to erode Iraqi military capabilities. Sanctions compelled Iraq to accept inspections and monitoring and won concessions from Baghdad on political issues such as the border dispute with Kuwait. They also drastically reduced the revenue available to Saddam, prevented the rebuilding of Iraqi defenses after the Persian Gulf War, and blocked the import of vital materials and technologies for producing WMD.
The unique synergy of sanctions and inspections thus eroded Iraq’s weapons programs and constrained its military capabilities. The renewed UN resolve demonstrated by the Security Council’s approval of a “smart” sanctions package in May 2002 showed that the system could continue to contain and deter Saddam. Unfortunately, only when U.S. troops invaded in March 2003 did these successes become clear: the Iraqi military that confronted them had, in the previous twelve years, been decimated by the strategy of containment that the Bush administration had called a failure in order to justify war in the first place.
Evidence . . .