The sanctions dilemma.

Hype doesn't help

On July 25, members of Voices in the Wilderness and Pax Christi began a three-week fast and lobbying effort outside the United States Mission to the United Nations. It was designed to persuade policy makers to end the comprehensive trade sanctions against Iraq. The vigil follows years of activity by Voices, including civil disobedience in the form of delivery of relief supplies to Iraq. The sanctions are about to enter an unprecedented eighth year. Voices' rallying point has been its claim that between 600,000 and 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the UN-supported sanctions, with a large proportion of these being children.

As an analyst of the humanitarian impact of the Iraqi sanctions, and as a supporter of Pax Christi, I share the hope that not one more Iraqi will die a preventable death. I, too, am convinced that the sanctions policy can and should have been managed more effectively and humanely. But I do not share the view of these groups that (1) sanctions constitute a genocide of Iraqis for which the West (read the United States) is to blame, or that (2) the international community (again read the United States) has sacrificed innocents as "acceptable" casualties in the struggle to control Saddam Hussein's ambitions to develop an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction.

Embedded in this disagreement over sanctions are excruciating ethical issues that Catholic peace circles have not sufficiently addressed.

* First, there is the problem of what to do about a brutal dictator who attacks not only his neighbors, but his own people with chemical agents, and who repeatedly frustrates attempts to secure full disclosure of Iraq's biological, chemical, nuclear, and other weapons programs.

* Second, there is the dilemma of accurately assessing to what extent the economic embargo has actually imposed hardship on the Iraqi people. For while there is no question that children in Iraq have died from treatable diseases and afflictions, we must also ask whether the Iraqi government's own policies actually attend to its people's needs.

* Third, there is the question of whether the international community's actions in the area of humanitarian relief parallel its rightful concern over weapons development.

While no effort should be spared to reduce the suffering of the Iraqi people, proponents for the removal of sanctions have failed to address these ethical quandaries. At its core, then, the question is: Do sanctions kill babies, or do Saddam Hussein's own policies kill them?

It is clear that the sanctions have caused severe health and nutrition problems in Iraq. As various analysts have documented, the sanctions imposed after the Gulf War created widespread unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, and severe shortages of previously imported commodities, including medicines, medical equipment, farm machinery, electrical generating equipment, and water purification supplies. As a result of these and war-related damage to water-supply and sewage-treatment systems, disease and malnutrition have risen sharply. Cholera, scarcely detected in the 1980s, reemerged at near-epidemic levels; typhoid spread alarmingly; and the stunting and wasting of children became widespread. As the UN Secretary General's November 1997 report observed: "The rate of acute malnutrition or wasting among children up to five years old was 11 percent, chronic malnutrition, which results in stunting, affected 31 percent, and 26 percent were underweight."

Faced with Saddam's intransigence on both weapons inspections and humanitarian relief efforts, the Security Council, though resolute on maintaining sanctions, was fairly unimaginative in executing an effective sanctions policy. In particular, the Council failed to see in the multiple requirements placed on Iraq after the Gulf War an opportunity to mix pressure, pain, and promises in ways that might have sparked more compliance, and which would have rewarded the real progress made on Iraq's compliance with various provisions important to the Council.

Specifically, there was neither new bargaining over sanctions, nor "trial balloons" about lifting some of the trade sanctions when Iraq accepted two major provisions of the Security Council resolutions: the creation of permanent UN monitoring facilities in November 1993, and the unqualified recognition of Kuwait's borders and sovereignty. Sanctions have gone awry because the Council did not mix carrots (such as the partial lifting of sanctions as rewards) with sticks (keeping sanctions on the free flow of oil) in attempting to close down Iraq's weapons development.

If we acknowledge that elements of the sanctions policy have been both ineffective and inhumane, why not simply accept lifting the sanctions? First, it is Baghdad itself that has stifled the UN-sanctioned, humanitarian oil-for-food program from its inception in 1991, holding innocent Iraqis hostage as the world community continually tried to get medicine and food relief into the country. Second, there is the continued persecution of the Iraqi people by Saddam Hussein himself. United Nations human rights agencies have cited Baghdad as the world's leader in the "disappearing" of political opponents: more than sixteen thousand.

Thus, Saddam Hussein's actions do not inspire the confidence that, should sanctions be lifted, incoming resources and revenues would be used to restock hospitals, to eliminate malnutrition, etc. In fact, what sanctions protestors fail to acknowledge is the real possibility that with the cessation of sanctions the world might see not only malnourished and dying Iraqi children, but continuing human-rights abuses, and the further development of weapons of mass destruction.

A related claim for lifting the sanctions takes the form of a "moral equivalency" argument. This argument sees Iraq as the victim of a double standard, noting that Israel's nuclear weapons do not subject Israelis to similar recriminations, and pointing to weapons held by other powerful but unsanctioned states as indicative of Western inconsistency and a bias against Iraq. But such arguments fail to acknowledge that Iraq is the only nation in recent times whose leader has sworn to use prohibited weapons, has a demonstrated record of using them, and denies international access to the records and places that would support Iraq's claim that no such programs exist.

Sanction critics, then, do not acknowledge this important ethical argument: that the international community has a moral obligation to insure that Kurdish children, Saudi children, Israeli children, Unites States children, and Iraqis themselves not be gassed or poisoned by Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and that this obligation is at least equal to the obligation to ensure life for Iraqi children. Without question, sanctions have been instrumental, although not singular, in attaining the major (and moral) goal of reducing Iraq's capacity to build and maintain an unchecked storehouse of prohibited weapons.

Those who claim that the Catholic "consistent life ethic" demands an end to sanctions often do not acknowledge the reality of Saddam's own perverse antilife ethic. It should not be difficult to consider the possibility that a leader who despises various other peoples to the point of waging aggressive war on them, might also use his own citizen-children as negotiating pawns to end sanctions, while maintaining the mechanisms he has set in place to build weapons of mass destruction.

Every steadfast effort to denuclearize the Middle East should be pursued. The same should hold for other weapons of mass destruction. But to be less vigilant at controlling these weapons in the tough cases like Iraq now because general disarmament is the more appropriate goal, costs the international community the moral leverage needed to motivate other, less aggressive producer states to voluntarily control their own weapons.

Still, a justification for the continuation of sanctions does not mean that their humanitarian impact must be accepted as an unintended consequence of furthering the moral good of controlling weapons of mass destruction. So too, demonstrating that sanctions contribute significantly to the continuing humanitarian ordeal in Iraq does not mean that such hardship necessarily leads directly to large-scale death. Nor does it mean that the primary or sole responsibility for the crisis rests with Western governments and the UN Security Council.

The United States and its allies bear some responsibility because of their inability or unwillingness to ease sanctions in response to early Iraqi concessions. But the translation of the sanctions to death and devastation rests with choices made by the government of Iraq itself in allocating its limited resources. On one level, Baghdad's refusal to utilize the humanitarian safety net provided by the UN casts a long shadow of blame back on itself. For the government of Iraq has needlessly prolonged the crisis by obstructing UNSCOM's work. The recent refusal to permit inspections comes on the heels of UNSCOM's director indicating that if this round of inspections had gone smoothly, Iraq would soon meet conditions necessary to remove sanctions.

Despite the sanctions, Iraq has not been without financial resources. It has managed to earn annual export revenues of $700-800 million through a small, illicit, but lucrative oil trade via Turkey and Iran, and by limited oil sales through Jordan. As leakage from the oil embargo has increased over the years, Baghdad's revenues have risen. Some suggest that Iraq has profited by manipulating oil-futures markets. And it has also retained access to some of its overseas financial assets, and to equipment and resources looted from Kuwait.

Saddam Hussein could have used these limited but, nonetheless, significant resources to address the needs of his people. Instead, the Iraqi government marshaled its resources to construct dozens of "palaces," erect monuments to its own glorification, and attempt to rebuild its vast military apparatus (including efforts to smuggle military technology and circumvent restrictions on weapons of mass destruction). In addition, Baghdad undertook a massive civil engineering project, and a military campaign against the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq through 1994, rather than address the needs of the general population.

Iraq's responsibility is compounded by its refusal to participate fully in the implementation of the various Security Council proposals to supply food, medicine and relief supplies. That pattern began with Iraq's 1991-95 refusal to implement UN Resolutions 706 and 712. By April 1995, a more detailed oil-for-food program came into being through Resolution 986, which was later bolstered by Resolution 1111. From the start, Iraqi officials complained that the enlarged relief effort would lead to further UN intrusion into their country's affairs; they insisted that only a complete lifting of sanctions could adequately address the country's humanitarian and economic development needs. Recent reports from Baghdad indicate that even the limited success of relief efforts that has occurred may compromise the Iraqis' claim that the humanitarian crisis warrants a full lifting of sanctions.

One final point may be in order. During the debate about sanctions, the cavalier use of data by some religious and peace groups has been especially disconcerting. The original research sources that gave rise to exaggerated figures such as "1 million deaths due to sanctions" have printed adjustments and corrections, but these revised data have not been acknowledged by activists. Many have preferred to repeat highly inflated numbers. Simply stated: It is not true that 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of sanctions. The most probable numbers of excess deaths which might be attributed to sanctions for the period 1990-97 are about 500,000. The mortality rate for children under five has more than doubled the pre-1990 period, meaning that within that half-a-million figure, about 289,000 excess child deaths have occurred. In the first three years of sanctions, those fifty years and older died in higher percentages because of the absence of heart, kidney, and other medications, along with the lack of equipment replacements.

This is an unacceptable tragedy. A moral case against sanctions should be able to stand on the basis of ten thousand innocent deaths or even one thousand innocent deaths. What is essential is the truth, and in my view, nothing could be more insulting to the prayer and fasting of faithful people trying to eliminate devastating sanctions, nor as dehumanizing to Iraqis themselves, as consciously employing incorrect data because of a belief that higher casualty numbers might mobilize more people to work against sanctions.

The Iraqi sanctions debate raises profound issues about ethics and international policy. Our quandary can be summed up in two questions: How do we deal with evil leaders in an effective and humane manner? And how do we relieve the suffering of innocents that might result from actions taken against those leaders?

The impact of the sanctions may be either immoral or moral, but judgments regarding their effect on innocent people must be assessed clearly by examining the response of the sanctioned country's leader and in light of the international relief effort mobilized on behalf of the innocent. In the case of Iraq, the moral ground continues to rest with sanctions.

George A. Lopez is director of the undergraduate peace concentration at the Joan B. Kroc Institute of International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. With David Cortright he has written extensively on sanctions, including reports to relevant UN agencies on the humanitarian impact of sanctions. They are the authors of "Trouble in the Gulf: Pain and Promise," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (May/June, 1998).