Kroc experts: U.S. ignored success of sanctions

The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has prompted much hand-wringing over what went wrong with prewar intelligence. Now, two security experts at the Kroc Institute 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 2004 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 Kroc Institute, where Cortright is a research fellow. Cortright also is president of the Fourth Freedom Forum. 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,” credits 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 Persian Gulf 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.
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