International sanctions against Iraq

The Reagan administration generally supported Iraq during the Iran–Iraq War, despite Iraq's extensive use of chemical weapons against post-revolutionary Iran. In response to reports of further Iraqi chemical attacks against its Kurdish minority after the end of the war with Iran, in September 1988 United States (U.S.) senators Claiborne Pell and Jesse Helms called for comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq, including an oil embargo and severe limitations on the export of dual-use technology. Although the ensuing legislation passed in the U.S. Senate, it faced strong opposition within the House of Representatives and did not become law. Several U.S. commercial interests with ties to Iraq lobbied against sanctions, as did the State Department, despite Secretary of State George Shultz's public condemnation of Iraq's "unjustified and abhorrent" chemical attacks. According to Pell in October 1988: "Agricultural interests objected to the suspension of taxpayer subsidies for agricultural exports to Iraq; the oil industry protested the oil boycott—although alternative supplies are readily available. Even a chemical company called to inquire how its products might be impacted." ==Administration==

As described by the United Nations (UN), the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 661 imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq following that country's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. These sanctions included strict limits both on the items that could be imported into Iraq and on those that could be exported. UN Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674, 677, 678 and 687 expressed the goals of eliminating weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and extended-range ballistic missiles, prohibiting any support for terrorism, and forcing Iraq to pay war reparations and all foreign debt. Enforcement of sanctions 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 U.S. to intercept, inspect and possibly impound vessels, cargoes and crews suspected of carrying freight to or from Iraq. The legal side of sanctions included enforcement through actions brought by individual governments. In the U.S., legal enforcement was handled by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). Effectiveness 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. According to scholars George A. Lopez and David Cortright: "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." Saddam told his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interrogator that Iraq's armaments "had been eliminated by the UN sanctions." ==Oil-for-Food Programme==

As the humanitarian impact of the sanctions became a matter of international concern, several UN resolutions were introduced that allowed Iraq to trade its oil for approved goods such as food and medicine. The earliest of these, Resolution 706 of 15 August 1991, allowed the sale of Iraqi oil in exchange for food, 25% of the proceeds (which were held in escrow The UN recounts that "Over the life of the Programme, the Security Council expanded its initial emphasis on food and medicines to include infrastructure rehabilitation". In 2004–2005, the OFFP became the subject of major media attention over corruption, as allegations surfaced that Iraq had systematically sold oil vouchers at below-market prices in return for some of the proceeds from the resale outside the scope of the programme; investigations implicated individuals and companies from dozens of countries. In 2005, a UN investigation led by Paul Volcker found that the director of the OFFP, Benon Sevan, personally accepted $147,184 in bribes from Saddam's government, which Sevan denied. By the late 1990s, the Iraqi economy showed signs of modest growth, which would continue until 2003: Iraq's gross domestic product increased from US$10.8 billion in 1996 to US$30.8 billion in 2000. The OFFP was the major factor in this growth, as it led to the inflow of hard currency, which helped reduce inflation. (Another factor was illegal transactions, as many countries began to simply ignore the sanctions.) While internal and external trade was revitalized, this did not lead to a significant increase in the standard of living for the majority of the population; on the contrary, the government tried to prevent benefits from flowing to Shi'ite areas in southern Iraq to persuade more countries to oppose the sanctions. In 2000, the national income per capita was estimated to be US$1,000—less than half of what it had been in 1990, according to Robert Litwak. ==Effects on the Iraqi people during sanctions==

High rates of malnutrition, lack of medical supplies, and diseases from lack of clean water were reported during the sanctions. In 2001, the chairman of the Iraqi Medical Association's scientific committee sent a plea to The BMJ to help it raise awareness of the disastrous effects the sanctions were having on the Iraqi healthcare system. In January 1991, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) prepared a detailed study of Iraq's water treatment system. Titled "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," the DIA study noted that Iraq's water treatment system was particularly vulnerable to sanctions, noting that "it probably will take at least six months (to June 1991) before the system is fully degraded," as supply levels of crucial water treatment chemicals such as chlorine and aluminium sulphate were "known to be critically low" and their "[i]mportation [have] been embargoed." The study thus predicted an increase in disease and even "epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid" if the sanctions remained in place. The percentage of Iraqis with access to clean drinking water dropped from an estimated 90 per cent in 1990 to 41 per cent in 1999. Denis Halliday, the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad, Iraq, resigned in October 1998 resigned after a 34-year career with the UN in order to have the freedom to criticise the sanctions regime, saying "I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide." However, Sophie Boukhari, a UNESCO Courier journalist, reports that "some legal experts are skeptical about or even against using such terminology" and quotes Mario Bettati for the view that "People who talk like that don't know anything about law. The embargo has certainly affected the Iraqi people badly, but that's not at all a crime against humanity or genocide." Halliday's successor, Hans von Sponeck, subsequently also resigned in protest, calling the effects of the sanctions a "true human tragedy". Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, followed them. Impact on agriculture Throughout the Ba'ath Party's rule over Iraq, the agricultural sector had been under-performing. Those in the U.S. who supported sanctions believed that low agricultural production in Iraq (coupled with sanctions) would lead to "a hungry population", and "a hungry population was an unruly one". The Iraqi government, which understood the serious effects the sanctions could have on Iraq, was able to increase agricultural output by 24 percent from 1990 to 1991. During the sanction years, the agricultural sector witnessed "a boom of unprecedented proportions". Iraq's Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) introduced several decrees during this period to increase agricultural performance. These decrees may be separated into three categories: • They introduced severe penalties on farmers (or landowners) unable to produce at full capacity on their land. • Government programs made it cheaper (and therefore more profitable for farmers and landowners) to produce. • Programs were initiated to increase the amount of arable land. The RCC introduced Decree No. 367 in 1990, which stated that all lands which were not under production by their owners would be taken over by the state; if the owner could not use all of the land he owned, he would lose it. However, the RCC's policy was not "all stick and no carrot". The government made it easier for farmers and landowners to receive credit. On 30 September 1990, the Ministry of Agriculture announced that it would increase loans to farmers by 100 percent, and would subsidize machinery and tools. In October 1990, the RCC stated it was planning to utilize and exploit "every inch of Iraqi arable land". While official statistics cannot be trusted entirely, they showed massive growth in arable land: from 16,446 donums in 1980 to 45,046 donums in 1990. In turn, irrigation projects were launched to meet the increased demand for water in Iraq's agricultural sector. The increase in agricultural output does not mean that hunger was not widespread; prices of foodstuffs increased dramatically during this period. However, overall the sanctions failed and (indirectly) led to an unprecedented improvement in agriculture, creating a constituency of farmers in central Iraq who had a vested interest in the sanctions remaining in effect. Data from 1990 is also consistent with the observation that destruction wrought by the 1991 Gulf War may be more responsible than the sanctions themselves for reducing Iraq's capacity to increase food production further. Joseph Sassoon commented on Iraq's successful use of food rationing to mitigate the effects of sanctions and war, suggesting that Iraq's government was not wholly lacking in competence or efficiency despite being portrayed as such by critics. Estimates of excess deaths due to sanctions During the 1990s and 2000s, many surveys and studies concluded that excess deaths in Iraq—specifically among children under the age of 5—greatly increased during the sanctions at varying degrees. On the other hand, several later surveys conducted in cooperation with the post-Saddam government during the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq "all put the U5MR in Iraq during 1995–2000 in the vicinity of 40 per 1000," suggesting that "there was no major rise in child mortality in Iraq after 1990 and during the period of the sanctions." However, when Sarah Zaidi—one of the study's coauthors—carried out follow-up surveys and reinterviews in 1996 and 1997: "65 deaths recorded in 1995 were not reported in 1996, and nine recorded in 1996 were not reported in 1995"; of 26 women interviewed in 1995 and 1997, "Nine child deaths that had been recorded in 1995 but not in 1996 were confirmed ... 13 were not confirmed, and four miscarriages and stillbirths were found to have been mistakenly recorded as deaths in 1995." Moreover, the results of the 1996 survey (38 deaths per 1000 births) was less than one-fifth that of the 1995 survey (206 deaths per 1000 births), leading Zaidi to conclude that "an accurate estimate of child mortality in Iraq probably lies between the two surveys." Zaidi later told Michael Spagat: "My guess is that 'some' Iraqi surveyors recorded deaths when they did not take place or the child had died outside the time frame but they specified the opposite." In 2000, Garfield, citing new data, recalculated his estimate to 350,000 excess deaths. Later on in 1999, the UN International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) published a study called the "Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Survey" (ICMMS). Using survey data from nearly 40,000 households collated in cooperation with Iraqi government and autonomous Kurdistan Region field workers, the ICMMS found that Iraq's under-5 child mortality rate increased from 56 deaths per 1000 births (during 1984–1989) to 131 deaths per 1000 births (during 1994–1999), which when extrapolated yields an estimate between 400,000 and 500,000 excess deaths among children under 5. The ICMMS reported that the autonomous Kurdistan Region experienced a lower child mortality rate (69 deaths per 1000 births) than the rest of Iraq. Several reasons have been cited for this: Kurdistan Region was subject to lesser sanctions; has borders with neighbouring countries that are more open than the rest of the country, making trade easier; and Oil-for-Food Programme aid was delivered to Kurdistan faster and at a higher per capita rate compared to the rest of Iraq. In 2005, an Independent Inquiry Committee (IIC) set up by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued that, "for all [its] flaws," data found in Iraq's 1997 census "make the very sharp surge in mortality reported by [ICMMS] somewhat implausible," even commenting that the ICMMS data "may have been 'tampered with.'" However, in 2007, researchers John Blacker, Mohamed M. Ali, and Gareth Jones pointed out that the 1997 census relied on "data obtained in a format that had elsewhere been rejected as unreliable 30 years earlier," and that the results between the independent IST survey conducted in 1991 (128.5 per 1000 births) and the ICMMS (131 deaths per 1000 births) closely matched each other, indicating the latter's reliability. Although Iraqi government field workers conducted the interviews, they were supervised by UNICEF personnel; "any instructions to falsify the data would have had to be slipped in behind [UNICEF's] backs." The researchers also commented that for such tampering to occur, it "would have had to involve the insertion of fictitious births and deaths into the records," which "would have been almost impossible to effect without introducing serious distortions into the pattern of birth intervals" but there is no evidence that this occurred. They thus "maintain that the ICMMS is the most reliable, indeed the only reasonably reliable source of information on mortality in Iraq in the 1990s." In 2017, researchers Tim Dyson and Valeria Cetorelli in The BMJ described "the rigging of the 1999 Unicef survey" as "an especially masterful fraud," citing that three comprehensive surveys (using full birth histories) conducted with the post-invasion Iraqi government—namely, the 2004 Iraq Living Conditions Survey (ILCS), which was initially discounted by the Volcker Committee for finding far fewer child deaths than expected, and the Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) carried out by UNICEF and Iraq's Ministry of Health (MOH) in 2006 and again in 2011—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 1990 and during the period of the sanctions," although a "slight increase" in child mortality did occur "between 1990 and 1991." As a corollary, "there was no major improvement in child mortality" as a result of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, contrary to claims made by some of its proponents. Per Dyson and Cetorelli, "the UN unobtrusively changed its own U5MR estimates in 2009." ==Controversies==

Culpability 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" under these frameworks, including rights-utilitarianism, moral Kantianism, and consequentialism. By contrast, some academics, American and UN officials, and Iraqi citizens contend that this ignores the consequences of allowing Saddam to continue his policies with no deterrence and unlimited capacity. Controversy about regional differences Some commentators blame Saddam Hussein for the excess deaths reported during this period. For example, Rubin argued that the Kurdish and the Iraqi governments handled OFFP aid differently, and that therefore the Iraqi government policy, rather than the sanctions themselves, should be held responsible for any negative effects. Likewise, 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." disputed the idea that excess mortality exceeded 500,000, because the Iraqi government had interfered with objective collection of statistics (independent experts were barred). Other Western observers, such as Matt Welch and Anthony Arnove, argue that the differences in results noted by authors such as Rubin 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, in war damage to infrastructure and in the relative ease with which smugglers evaded sanctions through the porous Northern borders. Spagat argued in response that "it is hard to believe that these factors could completely overwhelm the major disadvantages of the Kurdish Zone in which perhaps 20% of the population was internally displaced compared to about 0.3% in the South/Centre" and that the Iraq Family Health Survey (IFHS) suggests a higher (albeit declining) child mortality rate in the Kurdistan Region than elsewhere in Iraq during the mid-1990s. Arguments about the sanctions and the Iraq War Some analysts, such as Walter Russell Mead, accepted a large estimate of casualties due to sanctions, but argued that invading Iraq was better than continuing the sanctions regime, since "Each year of containment is a new Gulf War." Albright interview On May 12, 1996, Madeleine Albright (then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations) appeared on a 60 Minutes segment in which Lesley Stahl (referring to the 1995 FAO study wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean"; and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel". The segment won an Emmy Award. Albright's "non-denial" was taken by sanctions opponents as confirmation of a high number of sanctions related casualties. ==Lifting of sanctions==

Following the 2003 U.S. invasion, the sanctions regime was largely ended on May 22, 2003 (with certain exceptions related to arms and to oil revenue) by paragraph 10 of UNSC Resolution 1483. On 15 December 2010, the UNSC in a series of resolutions (i.e., Resolution 1956, Resolution 1957, and Resolution 1958) "voted to return control of Iraq's oil and natural gas revenue to the government on 30 June [2011] and to end all remaining activities of the [OFFP]". Iraq's Chapter VII obligations "concerning the return of Kuwaiti and third-State nationals" were rescinded in June 2013 by Resolution 2107. In December 2021, Iraq's central bank announced that it had paid off its entire debt of $52 billion in war reparations to Kuwait. ==Legacy==

In a 1998 fatwā, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden cited the sanctions against Iraq as a justification for attacks against Americans. Bin Laden stated that the sanctions had caused the deaths of 1.5 million Iraqi children in an effort "to destroy Iraq, the most powerful neighboring Arab state." In a 2015 article in the journal International Affairs, Francesco Giumelli noted that the UNSC had largely abandoned comprehensive sanctions in favor of targeted sanctions since the mid-1990s, with the controversy over the efficacy and civilian harms attributed to the Iraq sanctions playing a significant role in the change: "The sanctions imposed on Iraq in 1990 covered all goods entering or leaving the entire country, whereas those imposed today are most often directed against individuals or non-state entities, and are more limited in scope. ... The widespread view ... that 500,000 Iraqi children died as a result of UN comprehensive sanctions itself rang the death knell for the perceived utility of comprehensive measures." ==See also==