Sanctions: Cruel and counterproductive

The history of international sanctions has little to be proud of. From the pre-WWII US sanctions on Japan to more modern examples like Sudan, Iran and Iraq, there are no solid examples of sanctions achieving their stated goals, and myriad examples of them creating new problems. From the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis throughout the Clinton years to the medicine shortages in Iran today, sanctions have a grim history.

Yet the US and France are still talking up new sanctions on Syria, America’s Congress is even pushing to impose more sanctions on Iran, and indeed hardly a week goes by when the US doesn’t declare some new terms on Iran sanctions.

North Korea is more of an international pariah than ever because of sanctions, and the US has just announced its intentions of maintaining sanctions against Zimbabwe in displeasure over the results of that nation’s most recent election. In spite of their long, shameful history, sanctions are still the go-to response for the West.

On the one hand, it’s understandable. In the post-Soviet era of global commerce, trade is essential, and economic sanctions are as deadly as many wars. While the true cost of the US occupation of Iraq may never be fully known, the death toll of the decade of sanctions leading up to the decade of occupation was nearly as deadly, and the toll was even more skewed toward innocent civilians.

And even after a nearly decade-long occupation, those Iraq sanctions are only mostly lifted, with Iraq still trying to get the UN to lift the last vestiges of sanctions imposed after the invasion of Kuwait. Any notion of punishing the Saddam Hussein government seems particularly absurd now, a decade after his ouster and seven years after his death, but sanctions have a macabre momentum of their own.