Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked

View this article online at Foreign Affairs Printed copies of this policy brief may be requested by contacting the Forum By David Cortright, George A. Lopez Back to the publication

Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 19, 2004

Contact: David Cortright at 800-233-6786, ext. 14
or by email at dcortright@fourthfreedom.org

From Foreign Affairs 83, no 4 (July/August 2004): 90-103

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has prompted much hand-wringing over what went wrong with prewar intelligence. Now, two international security experts contend that too little attention has been paid to what went right: that the much-maligned UN-enforced sanctions actually worked.

George A. Lopez and David Cortright show how the combination of sanctions and inspections helped to destroy Saddam Hussein's war machine and his capacity to produce weapons. They present their argument in the July/August edition of the journal Foreign Affairs.

“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,” the researchers write. “They consistently ignored volumes of data about the impact of sanctions and inspections on Iraq’s military strength.”

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. For more than a decade, they have researched the United Nations program of incentives and punishments – known collectively as sanctions – that are aimed at reducing weapons of mass destruction.

Their article, “Containing Iraq: Sanctions worked,” credit sanctions with:

• Compelling Iraq to accept inspections and monitoring;
• winning concessions from Baghdad on political issue such as the border dispute with Kuwait;
• preventing the rebuilding of Iraqi defenses after the PersianGulf War;
• and blocking the import of vital materials and technologies for producing weapons of mass destruction.

Foreign Affairs is America’s most influential publication on international affairs and foreign policy. It is published by the nonpartisan Council on Foreign Relations. The journal can be found on-line at www.foreignaffairs.org. More about the authors, and a link to the article “Containing Iraq,” can be found on the sanctions research project link at http://www.nd.edu/%7Ekrocinst/research/econsanc.html.