Sanctions against Iraq

When the Oil-for-Food Programme (OFFP) allowed Iraq to resume exporting oil in 1996, the resulting revenue was held in escrow; Iraq had to ask the "Iraq Sanctions Committee" (i.e., the fifteen members of the UNSC) to individually approve its purchases, with "foodstuffs and certain medical, health and agricultural materials exempt from review" according to the United States Department of State.[19] (Additionally, some of the revenue was redirected for other purposes, notably reparations to Kuwait.[17]) In May 2002 the process was streamlined by Resolution 1409, which established a "Goods Review List" for dual-purpose items. From then on, all other Iraqi purchases were automatically approved, while the listed items were reviewed separately.[19][20][21]

An American helicopter shadows the Russian oil tanker Volgoneft-147

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.[22]

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).[18] For example, in 2005 OFAC fined Voices in the Wilderness $20,000 for gifting medicine and other humanitarian supplies to Iraqis without prior acquisition of an export license as required by law.[23]

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.[24] 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."[25][26][27] Saddam told his Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interrogator[28] that Iraq's armaments "had been eliminated by the UN sanctions."[29]

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".[42] 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.[43]

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.[44] In turn, irrigation projects were launched to meet the increased demand for water in Iraq's agricultural sector.[45] 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.[46]

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.[47]

Estimates of excess deaths during the sanctions vary widely, use different methodologies and cover different time frames.[8][48] The figure of 500,000 child deaths was for a long period widely cited, but recent research has shown that that figure was the result of survey data manipulated by the Saddam Hussein regime.[12][13]

A 1995 The Lancet estimate put the number of excess deaths of children under the age of five at 567,000,[49] based on a small sample size Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) survey conducted in Baghdad with Iraqi government interviewers that found a child mortality rate of around 200 deaths per 1000 births—several times larger than the previously reported rate. When Sarah Zaidi, one of the study's coauthors, carried out follow-up surveys in 1996 and 1997 with Jordanian interviewers, "many of the deaths were not confirmed in the reinterviews. Moreover, it emerged that some miscarriages and stillbirths had been wrongly classified as child deaths in 1995."[9][12][50] The child mortality rate suggested by Zaidi's 1996 survey (38 per 1000) was less than one-fifth that of the 1995 figure (206 per 1000).[50] Zaidi remained concerned about humanitarian conditions in Iraq, but forthrightly acknowledged a problem of replication,[9] hypothesizing at the time that "an accurate estimate of child mortality in Iraq probably lies between the two surveys."[50] She 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."[9]

A more detailed and seemingly more credible 1999 UNICEF study called the "Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Survey" (ICMMS), using survey data from nearly 40,000 households again collated by Iraqi government field workers (except in the autonomous Kurdistan Region), calculated that roughly 500,000 children had died as a result of sanctions,[51] based on the assumption that the child mortality rate had more than doubled from 56 deaths per 1000 births (during 1984–1989) to 131 deaths per 1000 births (during 1994–1999).[12] Notably, the ICMMS found a steady decline in the child mortality rate after 1992 in areas where data was collected by Kurdish, rather than Iraqi government, interviewers.[9] Limited child mortality data from Iraq's 1997 census was inconsistent with some ICMMS findings, and, much later, a 2017 study in The BMJ described "the rigging of the 1999 Unicef survey" as "an especially masterful fraud".[12] The three comprehensive surveys (using full birth histories) that have been conducted since 2003—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 sanctions were implemented.[12] 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.[12] Despite disproving its 1999 study in 2006 and 2011, UNICEF never formally disavowed the ICMMS results (or released the survey's underlying data to the public); however, the UN revised its official child mortality figures for Iraq to match the corrected data.[12]

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.[52][53] 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.[54]

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.[10][55] 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."[26] In the run-up to the Iraq War, some[56] disputed the idea that excess mortality exceeded 500,000, because the Iraqi government had interfered with objective collection of statistics (independent experts were barred).[57]

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,[58] in war damage to infrastructure and in the relative ease with which smugglers evaded sanctions through the porous Northern borders.[59] 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.[9]

Protesters in Washington DC against sanctions and invasion of Iraq, 2002 or 2003

Some analysts, such as Walter Russell Mead, accepted a large estimate of casualties due to sanctions,[60] but argued that invading Iraq was better than continuing the sanctions regime, since "Each year of containment is a new Gulf War."[61][62][63]

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[9]) asked her "We have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?" and Albright replied "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." Albright wrote later that Saddam Hussein, not the sanctions, was to blame. She criticized Stahl's segment as "amount[ing] to Iraqi propaganda"; said that her question was a loaded question;[64][65] wrote "I had fallen into a trap and said something I did not mean";[66] and regretted coming "across as cold-blooded and cruel".[67] The segment won an Emmy Award.[9][68] Albright's "non-denial" was taken by sanctions opponents as confirmation of a high number of sanctions related casualties.[58][64]

Albright addressed the controversy at length in a 2020 memoir: "In fact, the producers of 60 Minutes were duped. Subsequent research has shown that Iraqi propagandists deceived international observers ... Per a 2017 article in the British Medical Journal of Global Health, the data 'were rigged to show a huge and sustained—and largely non-existent—rise in child mortality ... to heighten international concern and so get the international sanctions ended.' ... This is not to deny that UN sanctions contributed to hardships in Iraq or to say that my answer to Stahl's question wasn't a mistake. They did, and it was. ... U.S. policy throughout the 1990s was to prevent Iraq from reconstituting its most dangerous weapons programs. Short of another war, UN sanctions were the best means for doing so."[69]

The Iraq Inquiry led by Sir John Chilcot examined a February 2003 statement by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair that "today, 135 out of every 1,000 Iraqi children die before the age of five". The inquiry found that the figure in question was provided to Blair by Secretary of State for International Development Clare Short and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) based on the 1999 ICMMS study, but an internal caveat from the FCO and the Department for International Development (DFID) to the effect that the ICMMS was of questionable reliability because it had been "conducted with the Iraqi regime's 'help' and relied on some Iraqi figures" was not communicated to Blair by a 10 Downing Street official. The inquiry noted "The level of child mortality in Iraq estimated by the ICMMS was significantly higher than that estimated by later surveys," citing revised UN "estimates that the under‑five mortality rate in Iraq was 55 per 1,000 in 1989, 46 per 1,000 in 1999, 42 per 1,000 in 2003, and 37 per 1,000 in 2010 (when Mr Blair gave his evidence to the Inquiry)."[70]