Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked
By George A. Lopez and
David Cortright
From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2004
Summary: The failure to find weapons of mass destruction
in Iraq has prompted much handwringing over the problems
with prewar intelligence. Too little attention has been
paid, however, to the flip slide of the picture: that the
much-maligned
UN-enforced sanctions regime actually worked. Contrary
to what critics have said, we now know that containment helped
destroy Saddam Hussein's war machine and his capacity to
produce weapons.
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
OF ABSENCE
Most coverage of the weapons inspections that
began after the Gulf War focused on Baghdad's efforts to
stall, evade, and obstruct UN monitors. But despite Saddam's
recalcitrance, the record now shows that the UN disarmament
program -- which Vice President Dick Cheney dubbed "the most
intrusive system of arms control in history" -- decapitated
Iraq's banned weapons programs and destroyed the infrastructure
that would have allowed it to restart clandestine programs.
From 1991 to 1998, the UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) identified
and dismantled almost all of Iraq's prohibited weapons. In
conjunction with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA),
it conducted hundreds of inspection missions at weapons sites
and documentation centers, systematically uncovering and
eliminating Iraq's nuclear weapons program and most of its
chemical, biological, and ballistic missile systems. After
four months of further inspections from November 2002 until
March 2003 -- which included 237 missions to 148 sites --
the UN Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission
(UNMOVIC) confirmed the depleted state of Iraq's capabilities.
Of course, the political assessments of these accomplishments
were muted. In Washington during the 1990s, each new weapons
report was taken as confirmation of Saddam's perfidy rather
than as a measure of success. There was a lingering belief
that behind each new discovery lay more hidden contraband.
Especially after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
the achievements of UN disarmament were ignored, and Saddam's
defiance was taken as confirmation that deadly stockpiles
remained. Despite these suspicions, however, progress was
being made. As former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix
wrote in his recent book, "the UN and the world had succeeded
in disarming Iraq without knowing it."
The greatest success
of the UN disarmament mission was in the nuclear realm. IAEA
inspectors found an alarmingly extensive nuclear weapons
program when they entered Iraq in 1991, and they set out
to destroy all known facilities related to the nuclear program
and to account for Iraq's entire inventory of nuclear fuel.
In 1997, the IAEA and UNSCOM concluded that there were no "indications
that any weapon-useable nuclear material remain[ed] in Iraq" or "evidence
in Iraq of prohibited materials, equipment or activities." After
four months of resumed inspections in 2002-3, IAEA Director-General
Mohamed ElBaradei confirmed that, according to all evidence,
Iraq had no nuclear weapons and no program to redevelop them.
He reported to the UN Security Council in March 2003 that
inspectors had found "no indication of resumed nuclear activities
... nor any indication of nuclear-related prohibited activities
at any inspected sites." The IAEA's report noted, "During
the past four years, at the majority of Iraqi sites, industrial
capacity has deteriorated substantially." (Inspectors also
found documentation of the alleged Iraqi attempt to import
uranium from Niger to be "not authentic" and rejected claims
that Iraq had attempted "to import aluminum tubes for use
in centrifuge enrichment.")
UN weapons inspectors also catalogued
and destroyed Iraq's once-substantial ballistic missile capability.
All but two of the 819 banned Scud missiles known to have
existed in Iraq prior to 1990 were accounted for. Although
inspectors discovered that Iraq had failed to declare some
dual-use equipment and attempted to import Russian ballistic-missile
guidance systems, they found no evidence that Iraq had actually
developed or flight-tested any prohibited missiles. Anthony
Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies
told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in July 2002, "Iraq
has not fired any Scud variants in nearly twelve years."
When
UN inspectors returned to Iraq in late 2002, they noted "a
surge of activity in the missile technology field." UNMOVIC
determined that the Al Samoud II missile exceeded the permitted
range (150 kilometers) by 30 kilometers and discovered large
chambers that could be used to produce missile rocket motors.
But when UNMOVIC officials demanded that the missiles and
the chambers be destroyed, Baghdad yielded: eradication was
underway when the U.S. invasion began.
UNSCOM achieved similar
success eliminating Iraq's chemical and biological weapons
programs. After the Gulf War, inspectors discovered stockpiles
of chemical weapons. They disposed of 480,000 liters of live
chemical agent and more than 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals.
As a panel of Security Council experts reported, "the prime
[chemical weapons] development and production complex in
Iraq was dismantled and closed under UNSCOM supervision and
other identified facilities have been put under monitoring." Inspectors
also supervised the destruction of Iraq's biological weapons
program, especially after Saddam's son-in-law General Hussein
Kamel defected and confirmed the large-scale production and
weaponization of anthrax, botulinum toxin, and aflatoxin;
in 1996, UNSCOM demolished the main biological production
facility at Al Hakam. When UNMOVIC inspectors entered Iraq
in 2002, they found no evidence of renewed chemical or biological
weapons programs.
The considerable deterrent value of weapons
monitoring also went unacknowledged by Washington. The presence
in Iraq of more than 100 highly trained weapons inspectors
equipped with the world's most advanced monitoring technology
provided an unprecedented ability to discover any clandestine
efforts by Baghdad to redevelop WMD. The Ongoing Monitoring
and Verification (OMV) system mandated by the Security Council
in 1991, for example, installed an elaborate network of radiological
and chemical sensors, cameras, ground-penetrating radar,
and other detection systems, bolstered by aerial surveillance
and no-notice visits to weapons facilities by inspectors.
As Blix concluded in the aftermath of last year's war, "it
is becoming clear that inspection and monitoring by the IAEA,
UNMOVIC and its predecessor UNSCOM, backed by military, political
and economic pressure, had indeed worked for years, achieving
Iraqi disarmament and deterring Saddam from rearming." And
with the open-ended reauthorization of OMV in 1999, there
was solid UN backing for continued monitoring.
Another benefit
of UN monitoring must be acknowledged: inspectors were a
vital source of intelligence. After UNSCOM inspectors left
Iraq in December 1998, just before the start of the Operation
Desert Fox bombing campaign, U.S. and UN officials were left
blind. Without inspectors on the ground and without the extensive
data provided by OMV monitoring instruments, they had no
independent means of knowing the status of Saddam's weapons
capabilities. Deprived of on-site reports and up-to-date
information and forced to rely on testimony from Iraqi defectors,
U.S. officials fell back on preexisting worst-case assumptions.
The withdrawal of UN inspectors thus set the stage for reliance
on the military option in 2003: Washington officials became
convinced that regime change was the only way to be sure
that Saddam did not have banned weapons.
THE SANCTIONS SAGA
In the past several months, the previously unacknowledged
success of UN weapons monitoring and disarmament has become
clear. But few analysts have gone a step further to identify
the primary reason for this success: the UN-enforced sanctions
regime. Dismissed by hawks as weak and ineffective and reviled
by the left for its humanitarian costs, the sanctions regime
has had few defenders. The evidence now shows, however, that
sanctions forced Baghdad to comply with the inspections and
disarmament process and prevented Iraqi rearmament by blocking
critical imports. And although many critics of sanctions
have asserted that the system was beginning to break down,
the "smart" sanctions reform of 2001 and 2002 in fact laid
the foundation for a technically feasible and politically
sustainable long-term embargo that furthered U.S. strategic
and political goals.
The story of the nearly thirteen years
of UN sanctions on Iraq is long and tortuous. For the first
six years, comprehensive sanctions cut Iraq off from all
world trade and shut down its oil exports, devastating its
economy and society. Coupled with the damage caused by Gulf
War bombing, sanctions helped spur a severe humanitarian
crisis that resulted in hundreds of thousands of preventable
deaths among children during the 1990s. When the oil-for-food
program took effect in 1996 -- allowing Baghdad to sell oil
and use the revenue, under UN supervision, to purchase approved
civilian goods -- the hardships of Iraqi civilians began
to ease.
Sanctions were met with considerable skepticism
from the start when they failed to force Iraq's withdrawal
from Kuwait. Nor did they persuade Iraq to comply with the
full range of demands in the cease-fire agreement after the
Gulf War. Yet Washington viewed sanctions as a punitive instrument
and refused to consider even a partial lifting of sanctions
in exchange for partial Iraqi compliance. (That position
contradicted Security Council Resolution 687, which stated
that sanctions would be lifted once Iraq lived up to UN disarmament
obligations.) Meanwhile, Baghdad exploited the humanitarian
crisis in Iraq to win international support for the lifting
of sanctions.
But despite such political failings and the
initial humanitarian cost, sanctions forced Baghdad to make
significant concessions on disarmament. Most important was
Iraq's acceptance of the OMV system. In October 1991, as
Baghdad's resistance to intrusive disarmament became evident,
the Security Council approved Resolution 715 mandating continuous
monitoring to prevent Iraqi rearmament. Saddam resisted initially,
but he yielded in November 1993, resulting in the installation
of monitoring equipment in 1994. The pressure of UN sanctions
was responsible for extracting this concession. In discussions
of the resolution in 1992, Iraqi leaders told UN officials
that they wanted concrete assurances that sanctions would
be lifted before Iraq would agree to accept the OMV system:
they hoped that accepting monitoring would bring them benefits
from the Security Council. Russian and French diplomats and
UNSCOM Chairman Rolf Ekeus encouraged such reasoning, believing
that the prospect of eased sanctions would entice Iraq to
comply with monitoring. (When Iraq accepted Resolution 715
in 1991, Russia and France proposed a statement from the
Security Council taking note of Iraqi compliance. The United
States and the United Kingdom blocked the statement, refusing
even to consider easing coercive pressure. Ekeus adjusted
his message accordingly. He told the Iraqis that the lifting
of sanctions would be an all-or-nothing proposition, depending
on full compliance with every aspect of the disarmament mandate.)
Once the ongoing monitoring system was in place, sanctions
continued to help force the regime to disarm. There were
numerous disputes between UN officials and the Iraqi government,
ranging from David Kay's famous 1991 standoff with Iraqi
officials in a Baghdad parking lot to the confrontations
in 1998 that prompted UNSCOM to withdraw. At several points,
Ekeus had to cajole Iraqi leaders to end their obstructionism
-- using the pressure of sanctions, and dangling the prospect
that they might some day be lifted, to assure compliance.
In 1995, for instance, Ekeus and his deputy, Charles Duelfer,
threatened to prolong sanctions in order to get Iraqi officials
to disclose past efforts to produce VX nerve gas. Without
further revelations, they warned, the chances of Iraq's getting
the sanctions lifted would be much reduced. In 1997, as Iraqi
harassment of inspectors increased, UNSCOM again used the
threat of continuing sanctions to overcome resistance. In
the face of Iraqi obstruction, the Security Council passed
Resolution 1115 in June 1997, temporarily suspending the
regular sanction reviews (thereby preventing any action to
lift sanctions) and threatening additional unspecified measures
unless the harassment of inspectors ceased.
Ekeus described
the critical importance of sanctions to the disarmament process
-- a "combined carrot-and-stick approach" -- in a 2000 interview: "Keeping
the sanctions was the stick, and the carrot was that if Iraq
cooperated with the elimination of its weapons of mass destruction,
the Security Council would lift the sanctions. Sanctions
were the backing for the inspections, and they were what
sustained my operation almost for the whole time." And according
to former UNSCOM adviser Tim Trevan, Iraqi Foreign Minister
Tariq Aziz told un inspectors that "the only reason Iraq
was cooperating with UNSCOM was that it wanted to be reintegrated
into the international community. Chief among the benefits
was the lifting of the economic sanctions."
DESTROYING THE
WAR MACHINE
In addition to driving the disarmament process,
sanctions undermined Iraqi military capabilities and prevented
rearmament by keeping Iraq's oil wealth and imports -- which
could be used to produce WMD -- out of the hands of Saddam
Hussein. Contrary to the Bush administration's assertion
that Iraq was a "gathering" threat, the Iraqi military and
weapons programs had, in fact, steadily eroded under the
weight of sanctions.
Estimates of the total amount of oil
revenue denied the Iraqi government range as high as $250
billion. For the first six years of sanctions, Iraq sold
no oil except for a small allowance to Jordan. After the
oil-for-food program began, oil sales generated, according
to UN figures, $64.2 billion in revenue. But the proceeds
from these sales went straight into a UN escrow account,
not the Central Bank of Iraq. Sanctions also blocked foreign
investment and oil development, which could have increased
Iraq's oil output to as much as seven million barrels a day
by the late 1990s (compared to a peak of around three million
barrels a day prior to the Gulf War).
Of course, no sanctions
regime can be 100 percent effective; smuggling and black
marketeering inevitably develop. Baghdad labored mightily
to evade sanctions, mounting elaborate oil-smuggling and
kickback schemes to siphon hard currency out of the oil-for-food
program. Investigations by the U.S. General Accounting Office
(GAO) and The Wall Street Journal put Iraq's illicit earnings
at $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion a year. An updated GAO report
estimated that illegal Iraqi revenues from 1997 through 2002
amounted to $10.1 billion, about 15 percent of total oil-for-food
revenues during that period.
Still, the sanctions worked
remarkably well in Iraq -- far better than any past sanctions
effort -- and only a fraction of total oil revenue ever reached
the Iraqi government. The funds that Baghdad obtained illicitly
were grossly insufficient to finance a large-scale military
development program. The government had no other major source
of income, in part thanks to the economic impact of sanctions.
Revenues from smuggling and kickbacks went mostly toward
maintaining Saddam's massive army and internal security apparatus
(as well as to building palaces and paying bribes to political
loyalists). As a result, almost no money was available for
the development of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons
systems, however much Saddam might have wished to rebuild
his arsenal. A regime that had previously spent lavishly
on its war machine was thus denied the means to rebuild its
war-ravaged military.
Indeed, U.S. government figures show
a precipitous drop in Iraqi military spending and arms imports
after 1990. State Department estimates suggest that spending
levels plummeted from over $15 billion in 1989 to less than
$1.4 billion a year through the 1990s. The estimated cumulative
arms import deficit -- the amount that Iraq would have spent
had it continued to import arms at the same pace as it did
in the 1980s -- through 1998 was more than $47 billion, a
deficit that Baghdad's various weapons-smuggling efforts
and black-market schemes could hardly diminish. The Iraqi
army thus found itself with, in the words of a 1998 report
from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, "decaying,
obsolete, or obsolescent major weapons."
The sanctions system
also prevented the import of specific items that could be
used for the development of long-range ballistic missiles
and nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. The United
States especially, but other major powers as well, made a
major investment in sanctions enforcement; the Security Council
remained united in its resolve to deny Iraq the means to
rebuild its weapons programs; and the dragnet was highly
effective in denying Iraq the means to redevelop WMD. Led
by Washington, intelligence, military, and police officials
in many countries mounted a massive effort to block shipments
of prohibited weapons to Iraq. State Department nonproliferation
specialists vetted oil-for-food contracts to screen for possible
weapons imports. The U.S. Navy established the Maritime Interception
Force, a multinational operation that over a ten-year period
searched more than 12,000 vessels in the northern Persian
Gulf. Such measures led to a series of high-profile successes.
In August 1995, for example, U.S. officials received a tip
from Israeli intelligence about a delivery of 115 missile
gyroscopes passing through Jordan to Iraq. The CIA immediately
dispatched a team to Amman and intercepted the guidance equipment.
A month later, UNSCOM officials fished another shipment of
gyroscopes from the bottom of the Tigris River, where Iraqi
officials had dumped them. A combination of watchful external
intelligence and inspectors on the ground prevented the guidance
systems from ever being used.
Similarly, the specialized
aluminum tubes that were a source of controversy in the prewar
debate never reached Iraq. Regardless of whether they were
to be used for uranium enrichment, as the administration
claimed, or for conventional rockets, as UN experts reported,
the tubes were intercepted before arriving, according to
the British government's September 2002 dossier. The dossier
documented foiled Iraqi attempts to purchase vacuum tubes,
a magnet production line, a large filament-winding machine,
fluorine gas, and other items that could have nuclear weapons-related
applications. As long as sanctions remained effective, the
report found, "Iraq would not be able to produce a nuclear
weapon." It also noted that "sanctions and the earlier work
of the inspectors had caused significant problems for Iraqi
missile development," by preventing Iraq from buying potential
ingredients of rocket fuel such as magnesium powder and ammonium
chloride.
Ironically, rather than bolstering the case for
sanctions, the interdiction of prohibited items was often
seen as a sign of their failure. Those skeptical of sanctions
focused on Iraq's attempts to smuggle material in the first
place, not on their having been thwarted. Inflated intelligence
assumptions mistook Iraq's nefarious intentions for real
capabilities, even in the face of evidence showing how deteriorated
the latter were. In reality, sanctions had left Saddam's
once-vaunted war machine in a state of utter disrepair.
A
STRONGER NET
In the run-up to war last year, some in Washington
acknowledged the impact of inspections and sanctions but
believed that sanctions would soon collapse. Kenneth Pollack
reiterated this argument in a January 2004 article in The
Atlantic Monthly, insisting that war was necessary because "containment
would not have lasted much longer" and Saddam "would eventually
have reconstituted his WMD programs." Support for sanctions
did indeed begin to unravel in the late 1990s. But beginning
in 2001, the Bush administration launched a major diplomatic
initiative that succeeded in reforming sanctions and restoring
international resolve behind a more focused embargo on weapons
and weapons-related imports.
One major reason for this renewed
consensus was the creation of a new "smart" sanctions regime.
The goal of "smart" sanctions was to focus the system more
narrowly, blocking weapons and military supplies without
preventing civilian trade. This would enable the rehabilitation
of Iraq's economy without allowing rearmament or a military
build-up by Saddam. Secretary of State Colin Powell launched
a concerted diplomatic effort to build support for reformulating
sanctions, and, in the negotiations over the proposed plan,
agreed to release holds that the United States had placed
on oil-for-food contracts, enabling civilian trade contracts
to flow to Russia, China, and France. Restrictions on civilian
imports were lifted while a strict arms embargo remained
in place, and a new system was created for monitoring potential
dual-use items. As the purpose of sanctions narrowed to preventing
weapons imports without blocking civilian trade, international
support for them increased considerably: "smart" sanctions
removed the controversial humanitarian issue from the debate,
focusing coercive pressure in a way that everyone could agree
on. The divisions within the Security Council that had surfaced
in the late 1990s gave way to a new consensus in 2002. The
pieces were in place for a long-term military containment
system. The new sanctions resolution restored political consensus
in the Security Council and created an arms-denial system
that could have been sustained indefinitely.
In the months
prior to the invasion, as Bush administration officials threatened
military action and dismissed sanctions as useless, additional
suggestions were offered to strengthen the sanctions system.
Morton Halperin, former director of policy planning at the
State Department, recommended a "containment plus" policy
during July 2002 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. The goal of such a system, Halperin said, "would
be to tighten the economic embargo of material that would
assist Iraq in its weapons of mass destruction and other
military programs as well as reducing Iraq's receipt of hard
currency outside the un sanctions regime."
Additional measures
could have further refined and strengthened the sanctions
regime. These could have included provisions to establish
sanctions assistance missions and install detection devices
on Iraq's borders to monitor the flow of goods across major
commercial crossings; to eliminate kickbacks by preventing
unscrupulous firms from marketing Iraqi oil and mandating
public audits of all Iraqi oil purchases; and to control
or shut down the reopened Syria-Iraq pipeline. This last
option, especially, was an obvious, feasible step that would
have immediately reduced the flow of hard currency to Baghdad.
The other measures would have taken more time and diplomatic
capital, but the United States had enormous leverage, precisely
because it threatened military attack, and it could have
used its clout to tighten the noose. Syria and other neighboring
states, for example, could have been persuaded to cooperate
in containing Iraq in exchange for improved diplomatic relations
with Washington. This would have solidified long-term containment
and laid the foundation for improved political relations
in the region. As with other nonmilitary options for achieving
U.S. aims, however, such proposals to enhance containment
were cast aside and ignored.
The adoption of "smart" sanctions in Iraq was a diplomatic triumph for the Bush
administration. It was followed a few months later by Iraq's acceptance of renewed
inspections and Security Council approval of a tougher monitoring regime in Resolution
1441. Indeed, the Bush administration spent its first two years methodically
and effectively rebuilding an international consensus behind containment. By
the fall of 2002, it had constructed the core elements of an effective long-term
containment system -- only to discard this achievement in favor of war.
DEMONSTRATION
EFFECT
The Iraq case demonstrates that intelligence estimates that
fail to take into account the success of past actions imperil
future
policy. As Washington
begins sensitive dialogues with Iran, Libya, Syria, and North Korea about
preventing the proliferation of WMD, this message -- specifically
as it relates to sanctions
and diplomatic pressure -- could not be more relevant.
The case of Libya
shows that sanctions can indeed influence regime behavior
in the long term. Muammar
al-Qaddafi was once as much an outlaw as Saddam Hussein. But over time, and
under the weight of international sanctions, Libya accepted
international norms, ended
its support of terrorism, and gave up its clandestine efforts to acquire
or build WMD. President Bush and other supporters of the
war in Iraq have attributed Libya's
dramatic turnaround to what Representative Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) termed the "pedagogic
value" of the war. But in reality, Libya's reversal began years before. UN sanctions
during the 1990s brought about the negotiations that convinced Libya to turn
over suspected terrorists for trial in The Hague. The State Department's 1996
report on global terrorism stated, "Terrorism by Libya has been sharply reduced
by UN sanctions." Subsequent discussions with Tripoli led to cooperation in the
campaign against terror and, most recently, to Libya's full disclosure of prohibited
nuclear weapons programs and cooperation in disassembling them.
Senior officials
from both the Clinton and the current Bush administrations have confirmed
that progress with Libya dated back to the 1990s. Flynt Leverett,
senior director
for Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council in 2003, wrote
that the Iraq war "was not the driving force behind Libya's move. ... Libya was willing
to deal because of credible diplomatic representations ... that doing so was
critical to achieving their strategic and domestic goals." Seif al-Islam al-Qaddafi,
influential son of and heir apparent to Qaddafi, told Le Monde that the U.S.-Libyan
dialogue began years ago and had nothing to do with the attack on Iraq. Of course,
sanctions were not the only factor in Libya's transformation. But the desire
to be reintegrated into the world economy was a powerful incentive for reform.
Having failed to understand how sanctions and inspections
worked in Iraq, the United States risks repeating its mistake
in the future. The crisis of intelligence
that pundits and politicians should be considering is not why so many
officials overestimated what was wrong in Iraq; it is why
they ignored so much readily
available evidence of what was right about existing policies. By disregarding
the success of inspections and sanctions, Washington discarded an effective
system of containment and deterrence and, on the basis of
faulty intelligence and wrong
assumptions, launched a preventive war in its place.
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