International sanctions against Iraq
Based on Wikipedia: International sanctions against Iraq
Three senior United Nations officials resigned in protest. The first, Denis Halliday, had spent thirty-four years building his career at the UN. When he walked away from his position as Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad in October 1998, he said something remarkable: "I don't want to administer a programme that satisfies the definition of genocide." His successor, Hans von Sponeck, would later resign with similar words, calling what he witnessed "a true human tragedy." Then Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Program in Iraq, followed them out the door.
What could drive three dedicated international civil servants to abandon their careers in protest? The answer lies in one of the most controversial and consequential economic sanctions regimes in modern history—the comprehensive embargo imposed on Iraq from 1990 to 2003.
The Embargo Begins
On August 6, 1990, just four days after Iraqi forces rolled into Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council slammed the door on Iraq's economy. Resolution 661 banned virtually all trade with Iraq. No imports, no exports, no financial transactions. The only exceptions were medicine and, under tightly controlled circumstances, food.
The stated goals seemed straightforward enough: force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait, make them pay reparations, and ensure they disclosed and eliminated any weapons of mass destruction—those feared biological, chemical, and nuclear arsenals that would later dominate global headlines for a very different reason.
Iraq lost the subsequent Gulf War in early 1991. But losing the war didn't end the sanctions. Resolution 687, passed in April 1991, lifted restrictions on food imports but kept the broader sanctions architecture firmly in place. The new condition for relief? Complete elimination of weapons of mass destruction.
This created an impossible situation. Iraq couldn't sell oil. Oil was essentially their only significant export. Without oil revenue, they couldn't buy what they needed. And without the ability to participate in global trade, their economy began to strangle.
The Water Knew First
In January 1991, analysts at the United States Defense Intelligence Agency prepared a remarkably prescient document. Titled "Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities," it laid out exactly what would happen to Iraq's civilian infrastructure under sanctions.
The logic was coldly mechanical. Iraq's water treatment plants required constant supplies of chlorine and aluminum sulphate—chemicals essential for making water safe to drink. These chemicals had to be imported. Under the embargo, importing them was prohibited.
The DIA analysts calculated timelines. "It probably will take at least six months before the system is fully degraded," they wrote. They predicted "epidemics of such diseases as cholera, hepatitis, and typhoid."
They were right.
Before the sanctions, approximately ninety percent of Iraqis had access to clean drinking water. By 1999, that number had collapsed to forty-one percent. The diseases the DIA predicted arrived on schedule.
A Programme That Couldn't Feed
The international community wasn't blind to the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Iraq. As early as August 1991, the Security Council passed Resolution 706, which would have allowed Iraq to sell limited quantities of oil to buy food. Resolution 712 followed in September, reaffirming the offer.
Iraq refused both times.
This seems baffling at first—why would a starving country reject food? But Saddam Hussein's government saw these arrangements as an unacceptable intrusion on sovereignty. The conditions attached felt like occupation by bureaucracy. So for years, Iraqi oil stayed in the ground while Iraqi children went hungry.
It wasn't until 1996 that Iraq finally signed a memorandum of understanding with the UN, creating what became known as the Oil-for-Food Programme—often abbreviated as OFFP. Under this arrangement, Iraq could sell two billion dollars worth of oil every six months. Two-thirds of that money would go toward humanitarian supplies for the Iraqi people.
But there was a catch. Actually, several catches.
The money didn't go to Iraq. It went into an escrow account controlled by the UN. When Iraq wanted to buy something—food, medicine, water treatment chemicals—they had to submit a request to something called the Iraq Sanctions Committee. This committee consisted of all fifteen members of the Security Council. Each purchase required individual approval.
Imagine running a country of twenty-two million people where every purchase order has to be approved by a committee of fifteen nations, some of whom consider you an enemy. The bureaucratic delays were staggering. Items would sit in approval limbo for months. Requests for "dual-use" items—anything that could theoretically have military applications—faced particular scrutiny. A water pump that could irrigate crops might also, in theory, be adapted for some military purpose. Better to delay approval, just in case.
The Humanitarian Math
Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, researchers tried to quantify the human toll of the sanctions. The numbers they produced were horrifying—and controversial.
Multiple surveys during this period suggested that child mortality had more than doubled. Estimates of excess deaths among children under five ranged from 227,000 to 500,000. These figures became powerful ammunition for critics of the sanctions regime, and they were cited repeatedly in international debates.
But the story of these numbers is more complicated than it first appears.
After the 2003 invasion toppled Saddam Hussein's government, researchers conducted three comprehensive surveys using full birth histories—a more rigorous methodology than earlier studies had employed. The 2004 Iraq Living Conditions Survey and the 2006 and 2011 Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys all found something unexpected: child mortality in the 1995-2000 period was approximately forty per thousand live births. This was certainly elevated compared to wealthy nations, but it didn't show the catastrophic spike the earlier surveys had suggested.
A 2017 study published in The BMJ—a prestigious British medical journal—offered a possible explanation. The researchers hypothesized that some of the earlier survey data may have been manipulated by Saddam Hussein's regime, which had obvious incentives to exaggerate civilian suffering to build international pressure against the sanctions.
This doesn't mean the sanctions were harmless. Far from it. Even the more conservative estimates showed clear evidence of damage: high malnutrition rates, shortages of medical supplies, diseases spreading through contaminated water, extended power outages, and an education system that nearly collapsed. Iraq's per capita income plummeted. The 1993 report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization described sanctions that "have virtually paralyzed the whole economy and generated persistent deprivation, chronic hunger, endemic undernutrition, massive unemployment and widespread human suffering."
The truth seems to be that the sanctions caused immense suffering—just perhaps not quite as apocalyptic as the highest estimates suggested.
The American Enforcer
If you've never heard of the Office of Foreign Assets Control, you're not alone. OFAC, as it's known, is a small office within the U.S. Treasury Department. Its job is to enforce economic sanctions—and it takes that job seriously.
In 2005, OFAC fined a group called Voices in the Wilderness twenty thousand dollars. Their crime? They had given medicine and humanitarian supplies to Iraqis without first obtaining an export license.
Think about that for a moment. An American organization wanted to help sick and suffering people in Iraq. They gathered medicine and supplies. They delivered them directly to people in need. And the U.S. government fined them for it.
The sanctions regime required that even humanitarian aid go through approved channels. OFAC existed to ensure those rules were followed. The law didn't care about intentions; it cared about compliance.
On the military enforcement side, the approach was more dramatic. Following Security Council Resolution 665, a Multinational Interception Force—led by the United States Navy—patrolled the waters around Iraq. Ships suspected of carrying cargo to or from Iraq were stopped, boarded, inspected, and sometimes impounded. The embargo had teeth.
The Irony of Success
From a narrow military perspective, the sanctions worked. They worked remarkably well.
Douglas Feith, who served as Under Secretary of Defense during the George W. Bush administration, acknowledged that the sanctions had diminished Iraq militarily. Scholars George Lopez and David Cortright went further: "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 most striking evidence came from Saddam Hussein himself. After his capture in 2003, during his interrogation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Saddam admitted that Iraq's weapons programs had been eliminated—by the UN sanctions.
So the sanctions achieved their stated military objectives. They just did so while inflicting enormous damage on ordinary Iraqi civilians who had no say in their government's policies.
Corruption and Collapse
As the sanctions dragged on year after year, cracks began to appear in the edifice.
Neighboring countries—Iraq's traditional trading partners—started quietly ignoring the restrictions. Smuggling networks flourished. The Iraqi government, desperate for hard currency outside UN control, developed schemes to generate illicit revenue.
The Oil-for-Food Programme itself became corrupt. Iraq discovered it could sell oil vouchers at below-market prices to favored buyers, who would then resell the oil at market rates and kick back some of the profits outside the programme's oversight. Investigations eventually implicated individuals and companies from dozens of countries.
In 2005, an investigation led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker found that Benon Sevan—the UN official who directed the Oil-for-Food Programme—had personally accepted nearly $150,000 in bribes from Saddam's government. Sevan denied the allegations, but the damage to the programme's credibility was done.
Despite all this, Iraq's economy showed signs of modest recovery by the late 1990s. Gross domestic product climbed from $10.8 billion in 1996 to $30.8 billion in 2000. The Oil-for-Food Programme, for all its flaws, had allowed hard currency to flow again. Inflation dropped. Trade revived.
But this recovery was deeply uneven. The Iraqi government deliberately prevented benefits from reaching Shi'ite areas in southern Iraq, hoping to use the continued suffering there to build international pressure against the sanctions. The regime's strategy was cynical but logical: the worse things got for civilians, the more likely the international community would lift restrictions.
The Unexpected Agricultural Boom
Here's something counterintuitive: Iraq's agricultural sector boomed during the sanctions.
Before the embargo, Iraq had been heavily dependent on food imports, using oil revenue to buy much of what the population ate. The Ba'ath Party had allowed agricultural production to languish. Why grow wheat when you could simply buy it with petrodollars?
American sanctions advocates had actually anticipated this vulnerability. They believed that reduced food supplies would create "a hungry population," and "a hungry population was an unruly one." The calculus was straightforward: starve the people, and they'll overthrow their government.
It didn't work out that way.
Instead, Saddam's government understood the existential threat and responded aggressively. The Revolutionary Command Council issued a series of decrees designed to maximize agricultural output. Some were carrots: government programmes made farming more profitable by subsidizing inputs and guaranteeing prices. Others were sticks: Decree No. 367, issued in 1990, stated that any agricultural land not under active production would be seized by the state.
The results were remarkable. Agricultural output increased by twenty-four percent between 1990 and 1991 alone. Over the course of the sanctions period, the sector experienced what observers called "a boom of unprecedented proportions."
Iraq didn't starve. It adapted. The sanctions forced a restructuring of the economy that, in this one narrow sense, actually made the country more resilient.
Before the Storm
The 1990 sanctions didn't emerge from nowhere. There had been an earlier attempt to punish Iraq economically—one that failed spectacularly due to domestic American politics.
In 1988, reports emerged that Iraq was using chemical weapons against its Kurdish minority. This wasn't Iraq's first use of chemical weapons—the Reagan administration had largely looked the other way while Iraq deployed them extensively during the Iran-Iraq War against the post-revolutionary Iranian government. But attacking your own civilians was different. It was harder to ignore.
Senators Claiborne Pell and Jesse Helms—an unlikely bipartisan pair—introduced legislation calling for comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq. The bill passed the Senate.
Then it died in the House of Representatives.
The lobbying against it was remarkable in its brazenness. As Senator Pell recounted 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."
The State Department opposed the sanctions too, despite Secretary of State George Shultz publicly calling Iraq's chemical attacks "unjustified and abhorrent." The gap between public condemnation and private policy was vast.
Two years later, Iraq would invade Kuwait, and suddenly sanctions became not just acceptable but mandatory. The same interests that had blocked sanctions in 1988 found themselves unable to resist the political momentum after Saddam's aggression.
The Legacy
The Iraq sanctions formally ended on May 22, 2003, after American and British forces had invaded and toppled Saddam Hussein's government. Some elements persisted longer, particularly those related to reparations payments to Kuwait—a reminder that in international relations, debts are collected regardless of how many regimes come and go.
But the broader legacy of the Iraq sanctions has shaped international policy ever since. The UN Security Council learned something important from the Iraqi experience: comprehensive sanctions—the kind that squeeze an entire economy—inflict disproportionate harm on civilians while often leaving the ruling elite relatively comfortable in their palaces.
Most sanctions regimes implemented since the 1990s have been "targeted" rather than "comprehensive." They freeze the assets of specific individuals. They ban travel for named officials. They restrict particular industries or companies. They try to hurt the people making decisions rather than the people living under those decisions.
This shift in approach came directly from watching what happened in Iraq. The international community saw children dying from contaminated water while Saddam Hussein continued to build elaborate monuments to himself. They saw malnutrition spreading while regime officials lived in luxury. They saw a policy designed to change government behavior instead destroying civilian infrastructure.
Whether the new "smart sanctions" approach actually works better is still debated. But the Iraq experience demonstrated conclusively that the old approach—strangling an entire economy to pressure its government—carries costs that much of the world found unacceptable.
Denis Halliday, Hans von Sponeck, and Jutta Burghardt resigned because they couldn't bear to administer a system that punished the innocent for the sins of their rulers. The international community, watching from a distance, eventually reached a similar conclusion. The Iraq sanctions achieved their military objectives. Whether those objectives were worth the human price remains one of the most troubling questions in modern foreign policy.