Sanctions against Iraq

Initially, the UN Sanctions Committee issued no complete list of items that could not be imported into Iraq. Instead, it evaluated applications for importing items to Iraq on a case-by-case basis, in theory allowing foodstuffs, medicines and products for essential civilian needs and barring everything else.

Persons wishing to deliver items to Iraq, whether in trade or for charitable donation, were required to apply for export licenses to the authorities of one or more UN member state, who then sent the application to the Sanctions Committee. The committee made its decision in secret; any Committee member could veto a permission without giving any reason. As a rule, anything that could have a conceivable military use was banned, such as computers, tractors, although Committee asserted its sole discretion in determining what is essential for every Iraqi and either permitting or denying any thing to the Iraqi population. If the Committee granted approval, it notified the country where the application came from; that country then informed the applicant; the applicant then shipped the items, but the items remained subject to inspection and risk of impoundment.

In 2002 the process was streamlined, and the sanctions committee established a 'Goods Review List' for certain items. Anything not on the Goods Review list could be imported without restriction, while items with dual-purpose items would be reviewed on a case-by-case basis.[15][16]

Limitations on Iraqi exports (chiefly oil) made it difficult to fund the import of goods into Iraq. Following the 1991 Gulf War, a United Nations inter-agency mission assessed that "the Iraqi people may soon face a further imminent catastrophe, which could include epidemic and famine, if massive life-supporting needs are not rapidly met."[17] The Government of Iraq declined offers (in UNSRC resolutions 706 and 712) to enable Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil to meet its people's needs. Acting under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, the Security Council established the Oil for Food Programme via resolution 986 on 14 April 1995 as intended a "temporary measure to provide for the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, until the fulfillment by Iraq of the relevant Security Council resolutions...". Implementation of the Programme started in December 1996; its first shipment of supplies arrived in March 1997. The Programme was funded exclusively with the proceeds from Iraqi oil exports. At first, Iraq was permitted to sell $2 billion worth of oil every six months, with two-thirds of that amount to be used to meet Iraq's humanitarian needs. In 1998, the limit was raised to $5.26 billion every six months. In December 1999, Security Council resolution 1284 removed the limit on the amount of oil exported.

With the adoption of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1330 in 2000, Iraqi oil export proceeds were allocated as follows:,[18]

• 72% was allocated to the humanitarian Programme
• 25% was allocated to the Compensation Fund for war reparation payments
• 2.2% for United Nations administrative and operational costs
• 0.8% for the weapons inspection programme.

Of the 72% allocated to humanitarian purposes:

• 59% was earmarked for the contracting of supplies and equipment by the Government of Iraq for the 15 central and southern governorates.
• 13% for the three northern governorates, where the United Nations implemented the Programme on behalf of the Government of Iraq.

An American helicopter shadows the Russian oil tanker Volgoneft-147

Enforcement of the sanctions was primarily by means of military force and legal sanctions. Following the passage of Security Council Resolution 665, a Multinational Interception Force was organized and led by the United States to intercept, inspect and possibly impound vessels, cargoes and crews suspected of carrying freight to or from Iraq.[19]

The legal side of sanctions included enforcement through actions brought by individual governments. In the United States, legal enforcement was handled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).[14] For example, in 2005 OFAC fined Voices in the Wilderness $20,000 for gifting medicine and other humanitarian supplies to Iraqis without prior acquisition of an export license as required by law.[20] In a similar case, OFAC is still attempting to collect (as of 2011) a $10,000 fine, plus interest, against Bert Sacks for bringing medicine to residents of Basra.[21]

There is a general consensus that the sanctions achieved the express goals of limiting Iraqi arms. For example, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith says that the sanctions diminished Iraq militarily[22] and scholars George A. Lopez and David Cortright say sanctions compelled 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 Persian Gulf War; and blocking the import of materials and technologies for producing weapons of mass destruction".[23][24][25] Hussein told his FBI interrogator [26] that Iraq's armaments "had been eliminated by the UN sanctions."[27]

Estimates of excess deaths during the sanctions vary widely, use different methodologies and cover different time-frames.[8][36][37] The figure of 500,000 child deaths was for a long period widely cited, but recent research has shown that that figure was the result of survey data manipulated by the Saddam Hussein regime.[12][38] A 1995 Lancet estimate put the number of child deaths at 567,000,[39] but when one of the authors of the study followed up on it a year later, "many of the deaths were not confirmed in the reinterviews. Moreover, it emerged that some miscarriages and stillbirths had been wrongly classified as child deaths in 1995."[12][40] A 1999 UNICEF report found that 500,000 children died as a result of sanctions,[41] but comprehensive surveys after 2003 failed to find such child mortality rates.[12] A 2017 study in the British Medical Journal described "the rigging of the 1999 Unicef survey" as "an especially masterful fraud".[12] The three comprehensive surveys conducted since 2003 all found that the child mortality rate in the period 1995-2000 was approximately 40 per 1000, which means that there was no major rise in child mortality in Iraq after sanctions were implemented.[12]

Scholar Ramon Das, in the Human Rights Research Journal of the New Zealand Center for Public Law, examined each of the "most widely accepted ethical frameworks" in the context of violations of Iraqi human rights under the sanctions, finding that "primary responsibility rests with the UNSC [United Nations Security Council]" under these frameworks, including rights-utilitarianism, moral Kantianism, and consequentialism.[45][46]

Many academics, American and UN officials, and Iraqi citizens contend that this ignores the overriding control of Saddam Hussein and the corrupt contractors who maintained it, as well as the consequences of allowing Hussein to continue his policies with no deterrence and unlimited capacity.[47] During its last decade, the regime of Saddam Hussein cut public health funding by 90 percent, contributing to a substantial deterioration in health care.[48]

Some commentators blame Saddam Hussein for the excess deaths during this period. For example, Rubin argued that the Kurdish and the Iraqi governments handled Oil For Food aid differently, and that therefore the Iraqi government policy, rather than the sanctions themselves, should be held responsible for any negative effects.[49][10] Likewise, David Cortright claimed: "The tens of thousands of excess deaths in the south-center, compared to the similarly sanctioned but UN-administered north, are the result of Baghdad's failure to accept and properly manage the UN humanitarian relief effort."[24] In the run-up to the Iraq War, some[50] disputed the idea that excess mortality exceeded 500,000, because the Iraqi government had interfered with objective collection of statistics (independent experts were barred).[51]

Other Western observers, such as Matt Welch and Anthony Arnove, argue that the differences in results noted by authors such as Rubin (above) may have been because the sanctions were not the same in the two parts of Iraq, due to several regional differences: in the per capita money,[52] in war damage to infrastructure and in the relative ease with which smugglers evaded sanctions through the porous Northern borders.[53] This argument was debunked by several UN-sponsored studies taken after the overthrow of Saddam's regime, which revealed that the previous childhood mortality figures for South/Central Iraq were inflated by more than a factor of two and that the childhood mortality rate in those regions was even lower than the rate in northern Iraq.[9]

Protesters in Washington DC against sanctions and invasion of Iraq, 2002 or 2003

Some persons, such as Walter Russell Mead, accepted a large estimate of casualties due to sanctions,[54] but argued that invading Iraq was better than continuing the sanctions regime, since "Each year of containment is a new Gulf War."[55][56][57] Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in his testimony to the Chilcot Inquiry, also argued that ending sanctions was one benefit of the war. Citing recent studies disproving any increase in childhood mortality in Iraq under the sanctions regime, Michael Spagat declared "this claim should now take up its rightful place in the historical record next to Iraq's mythical weapons of mass destruction."[9]

There were also arguments saying the sanctions had not been as effective as people had thought, due to reports of companies not following trade sanctions on Iraq during this time. One of those countries being France as shown in The Guardian,[58] Washington Times [59] according to Bill Gertz, and New York Times [60] articles that they had been trading Iraq weapons, supplies and nuclear technology leading up to and some argue after the sanctions helping support the Iraq government. So overall the sanctions didn't help in the way it was intended or at least were not successful.

On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright (then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) appeared on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl asked her "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Albright wrote later that Saddam Hussein, not the sanctions, was to blame. She criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda"; said that her question was a loaded question;[61][62] wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean";[63] and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel".[64] The segment won an Emmy Award.[9][65] Albright's "non-denial" was taken by sanctions opponents as confirmation of a high number of sanctions related casualties.[52][61]

There is evidence that the Iraqi government did not fully cooperate with the sanctions. For example, Hussein's son-in-law is heard speaking of concealing information from UN inspectors on audiotapes released in 2006. "I go back to the question of whether we should reveal everything or continue to be silent. Sir, since the meeting has taken this direction, I would say it is in our interest not to reveal." [66][67] Hussein may have considered the many governments' displeasure with him, but particularly that of two veto-wielding UNSC members, the United States and United Kingdom (both of which took the hardest lines on Iraq), as a no-win situation and disincentive to cooperation in the process.[68]

It has been alleged that UNSCOM had been infiltrated by British and American spies for purposes other than determining if Iraq possessed WMDs.[69][70] Former inspector Scott Ritter was a prominent source of these charges. Former UNSCOM chief inspector David Kay said "the longer it continued, the more the intelligence agencies would, often for very legitimate reasons, decide that they had to use the access they got through cooperation with UNSCOM to carry out their missions".[71][72]

Renewed pressure in 2002 led to the entry of UNMOVIC, which eventually received some degree of cooperation; before it could complete its work, the United States required it to leave Iraq to avoid its impending 2003 invasion of Iraq.