fter seven years, this administration has yet to find
the right formula for dealing with what we now call "the rogue nations." Five years of bribes to North
Korea seem only to have whetted the hermit
kingdom's appetite for more bribes. On the other
hand, U.S. sanctions have failed to dislodge or
weaken the grip of hostile regimes in Iraq, Iran,
Cuba, or Serbia, but have enraged our allies who
defy them, and spread resentment against America
all over the world. In our desire to punish old
enemies, we seem only to be creating new ones.
Indeed, sanctions have become the feel-good but
ineffectual foreign policy of the self-righteous. Let us
consider.
A year ago, an article appeared in the New York
Times under the headline "Iraq: A Pediatrician's
Hell: No Way to Stop the Dying." The reporter led
readers through a day with the chief resident at the
central teaching hospital for pediatrics in Baghdad.
Iraq, the doctor told his visitor, was once the most
advanced country in the Arab world for science and
medicine. Now, Iraq's doctors cannot even read
medical journals; because medical journals are
embargoed. Childhood leukemia, a disease with a
cure rate of 70 percent in America, is now nearly
always fatal in Iraq. Disposable syringes must be
used over and over again. Their importation has
been blocked out of fear that medical syringes will
be used to create anthrax spores. Ancient X-ray
machines leak radiation. Chlorine, a vital water
disinfectant, all the more necessary because Iraq's
sewage treatment plants were bombed in Desert
Storm, is embargoed, lest it be diverted into
chlorine gas. Even the plastic bags needed for
blood transfusions are restricted.
Last year, Denis Halliday, the UN humanitarian
coordinator in Iraq, resigned in protest and returned
home to Ireland. By Halliday's estimate, 5,000 Iraqi
children die every month from the impact of
sanctions on Iraq's water supply, sanitation, diet,
and medical care. The deaths come from dysentery,
cholera, and malnutrition, which lowers resistance
to other diseases. Halliday holds America, the
principal advocate and enforcer of UN Security
Council sanctions, responsible for the deaths of
60,000 Iraqi children every year, and of 500,000
since 1991. If his figures are correct, more Iraqi
children have been lost in nine years to U.S.
sanctions than all the American soldiers killed in
combat in all the wars of the 20th century.
Woodrow Wilson called sanctions the "peaceful
silent deadly remedy." Today, they may fairly be
called America's silent weapon of mass destruction
whose victims are almost always the weak, the sick,
the women and the young. When Arab terrorists
murder Israeli children, we Americans are rightly
filled with horror and disgust. But what do Arab
peoples think of us when U.S sanctions bring death
to literally thousands of Iraqi children every single
month? Can a nation that declares piously it will
never stoop to assassinating tyrants, but wields a
sanctions sword that slaughters children, truly call
itself "the home of the brave?"
Now, Saddam Hussein is undeniably a tyrant, who
brutalizes his people and has sought to build
weapons of mass destruction. But sanctions have
failed to remove him from power. And as he cannot
survive outside his heavily guarded palaces, he will
never surrender power. Thus, the sanctions, while
murderous to Iraq's people, have little prospect of
success. In a real sense, Saddam today is holding
the people of Iraq hostage, while America kills the
hostages. A few years ago, Madeleine Albright was
asked on 60 Minutes if she believed that a policy
that killed so many children was worth it. She
answered: "We believe the price is worth it." No,
Madam Secretary, it is not worth it. A policy that
sentences thousands of Iraqi children to death every
month, because their parents will not rise up and
overthrow a tyrant, is unrighteous and immoral.
For centuries, philosophers and theologians have
grappled with the question of under what
circumstances a just war may be fought. Christian
doctrine demands that such a war be defensive, and
never aggressive. It must be waged only as a last
resort, after all other means of negotiating peace
have been exhausted. The violence used must be
proportional to the threat. There must be a prospect
of victory so that soldiers are not sent to their death
for no purpose. In a just war, innocents may never
be directly targeted; and, after the fighting is over,
there must be no acts of vengeance. Today, U.S.
sanctions on Iraq contravene virtually every tenet of
the Just War doctrine. After nine years, we have
failed in our goal of ousting Saddam; it is not he or
his henchmen who suffer, it is the innocent people of
Iraq. And it is impossible to argue that the death of
scores of thousands of children is a price
proportional to the threat associated with Saddam
Hussein's survival in power.
Surely, these are the reasons Pope John Paul II has
called for an end to sanctions on Iraq, that the
National Council of Catholic Bishops has called for
lifting the embargo. These clerics are giving witness
to the deepest traditions of Christian ethical teaching
on the most difficult of human problems.
But U.S. economic warfare is not confined to
Baghdad. In Mr. Clinton's first term, the U.S.
imposed 61 unilateral sanctions on 35 countries.
Even his own Secretary of Commerce, William
Daley, concedes that "we've become a sanctions
happy nation."
Since Colonel Khadafi was found culpable in the air
massacre of Pan Am 103, the U.S. has imposed
strict sanctions on Libya. What have they
accomplished? Khadafi has handed over two
suspects in the atrocity and ousted Abu Nidal, the
front man for Palestinian terror. But even as U.S.
sanctions have remained in force, U.S.-made
computers, fuel pumps and drilling equipment pour
in from our NATO allies and our ban on air travel is
circumvented by a ferry to Malta. Lately, Italy's
Prime Minister completed a visit to Libya.
We also maintain sanctions on Iran, which has
indeed been a hostile nation. Twenty years ago,
Teheran held 52 U.S. diplomats and Marines
hostage for 14 months. That regime undermines the
Middle East peace process; and its agent may have
colluded in the terrorist bombing of Khobar towers.
But if Iran is responsible for the deaths of scores of
Americans, China, North Korea, and North
Vietnam are responsible for the deaths of 100,000
U.S. soldiers. Yet, we engage Vietnam, send
foreign aid to North Korea, and provide China with
a $60 billion annual trade surplus?
Are the regimes in North Korea and Vietnam
morally superior to Iran's? Are those countries
more strategically important? If we believe the
cause of peace is advanced when Israelis talk to
Arafat, and British talk to the IRA, why should we
not talk to Teheran?
Just last month, the U.S. imposed sanctions on
Afghanistan, because the ruling Taleban refuses to
deliver up Osama bin Laden. But rather than
revolting against the regime, the Afghani people
took to the streets of Kabul shouting "Death to
America!" They burned our flag; six UN buildings
were stoned or burned. Have we not learned from
our own history, of British sanctions against the 13
colonies? Embargoes do not cow people into
submission, they unite people in defiance.
Last May, nuclear tests by India and Pakistan
triggered a U.S. law imposing sanctions. India has
since increased defense spending by 14%; Pakistan
by 9%. Has either given up its nuclear arsenal?
As for Myanmar next door, Mr. Clinton declared in
1997 that "the actions of the Government [there]
constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the
security of the United States." He then banned all
American investment in that country. And what was
the "extraordinary threat"? The ruling junta in
Rangoon had refused to recognize an opposition
victory in the May 1990 elections and was holding
Nobel Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi under house
arrest.
And how effective was our policy of "isolating"
Myanmar? The Philippines and Thailand dropped
their opposition to Myanmar's application for
membership in the Association of Southeast Asian
Nations, ASEAN, and, to defy Uncle Sam, invited
Myanmar, and Laos and Cambodia as well, to join
ASEAN.
After smashing Serbia with our 78-day bombing
campaign, we now quarrel with our NATO allies
over how severe sanctions should be. The
Clinton-Albright preference is to block all
assistance in removing toxic war debris and
bombed bridges from the Danube, and to deny the
Serbs heating oil in coming the brutal Balkan winter.
This immoral policy shames us as a people. We are
putting old men, women, and children under a
sentence of death for failing to do what NATO itself
could not do: overthrow Slobodan Milosevic?
Moreover, as the London Economist writes:
Isolation has helped [Milosevic and Saddam] to
stoke paranoia, justify repression and escape
responsibility for their people's suffering. In Iraq,
and to a lesser extent in Serbia, sanctions have
ruined the liberal middle class and spawned
gangster elites. The poor, meanwhile, cannot think
beyond the struggle to keep alive.
Finally, in Cuba, our embargo continues to give
Fidel Castro a scapegoat for his own socialist
failures. His dictator's grip has not been loosened;
seized American properties have not been returned;
yet, after 37 years, the sanctions endure.
In 1991, Castro's umbilical chord was severed
when Havana lost its $5 billion annual subsidy from
Moscow. Though the world has turned upside
down since then, U.S. policy remains frozen. And,
because of the siege mentality our embargo has
created inside Cuba, our sanctions may today be
the main pillar of Castro's power.
And there is monumental hypocrisy in how
President Clinton applies his sanctions policy. He
blockaded, starved and invaded tiny Haiti for
human rights violations, but he proudly chaperones
China into the WTO. He imposes sanctions on
Myanmar as a threat to the security of the United
States, but shovels billions in aid to a North Korea
that is building missiles to target America and our
allies.
In recent years, President Clinton has sought
waivers on many of these sanctions, not because his
administration has any scruples about sanctions, but
because Europeans have repeatedly protested
Washington's arrogance in unilaterally imposing its
will.
But if these sanctions enrage Europeans, think of
their impact on the nations that suffer. It is child's
play for targeted regimes to ascribe all the
deprivations of their people to U.S. malice and
power. Their propaganda task is made easier,
because the charge has truth. Our sanctions are
sowing seeds of hatred that will one day flower in
acts of terrorism against us, years after these
sanctions expire.
Looking over the record of U.S. sanctions against
rogue states, it seems that they fail us by virtually
every measure. Sanctions impose suffering not on
dictators, but on their oppressed people; they
antagonize allies and undermine our leadership; they
build up deposits of resentment and hatred against
us among Arab, Islamic and Asian people; they
deny our businessmen and farmers access to
markets our rivals rush to capture; and they fail
either to disarm or dislodge the targeted regime.
They only massage our sense of moral superiority
over other nations.
I do not oppose sanctions because I worry
principally about our lost exports, though the
economic arguments of U.S. businessmen who fight
a sanctions-driven policy are persuasive. I do not
oppose sanctions because I am worried about the
reaction of European businessmen and diplomats
who resent America's efforts to apply our laws to
their activities. I oppose them because sanctions
have become a way for the United States to vent its
anger on the cheap.
Among my first acts as President will be to declare
an end to all sanctions on the sale or transfer of
U.S. food, medicine, or goods essential to a decent
life or a civilian economy now in force against
Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Myanmar,
Sudan, and all the other targeted nations of U.S.
sanctions policy.
I am not naive. I have served three Cold War
Presidents in the White House. I know that if U.S.
sanctions are lifted, our problems with rogue
regimes will not end. After we wipe the slate clean,
there may arise circumstances in which sanctions
appear the only possible action. No president can
forswear the option. But if they are to be reapplied,
I will understand what the world used to know: that
embargoes and blockades are weapons of war. If
they are to be used, they must be designed so that
innocent people are not the principal casualties; and
they should be imposed only on regimes that engage
in acts of war against the United States. That a
regime is autocratic, dictatorial, or odious to us is
not enough; no one has deputized America to play
Wyatt Earp to the world.
There are other ways to punish rogue regimes. We
can seize the bank accounts and overseas assets of
their rulers, deny visas to their diplomats and
military, cut off World Bank and IMF loans, deny
Export-Import Bank credits, put tariffs on the
principal exports of hostile governments to deny
them the hard currency to strengthen the state. We
can deny their national airlines landing rights.
In retaliation for attacks on U.S. citizens, the United
States, the most powerful nation on earth, can
retaliate militarily as we see fit. We can indict
terrorists in U.S. courts and run them down. These
are legitimate sanctions that zero in on real
enemies.
Once, we knew how to deal with tyrants, even
tyrants armed with nuclear weapons. Deterrence
and containment worked against the evil empires of
Stalin and Mao. They can work against the lesser
tyrannies of a new century.
As we end this American Century and this decade
of national preeminence, we remain a people
divided over our role in the world. It is a time for
what Catholics call a "retreat," not a withdrawal into
isolationism, but a day of introspection. Why is
America, its economic and military power unrivaled,
its popular culture dominant in the world, so
resented by so many. Is it envy? Is it because we
are an enlightened nation and they are benighted?
Or have we, too, succumbed to the hubris of
hegemony? Recall: In 1763, the England of Pitt had
crushed her great rival, France, seized her vast
American estate, and emerged as the world's only
superpower. London reveled in its preeminence. As
Walpole wrote, his contemporaries were "born with
Roman insolence" and "acted with more haughtiness
than an Asiatic monarch."
Yet, in less than a generation, Britain had lost the
loyalty of its American subjects, who, aided by a
defeated vengeful France, expelled her from the 13
colonies that had been the crown jewels of the
empire. And all the world rejoiced in Britain's
humiliation, as, one suspects, much of today's world
might rejoice in ours.
I count myself a patriot. But if all this Beltway
braying about our being the "world's indispensable
nation" and "only superpower" grates on my ears,
how must it grate upon Europeans, Russians, and
those peoples subject to U.S. sanctions, because
they have failed by our lights to live up to our
standards?
The great foreign policy question before this
generation is the one that has bedeviled us since our
birth as a nation. Are we to be a city on a Hill, a
light unto the nations, Henry Clay's "lamp burning
on the Western shore"? Or have we been handed a
divine commission to "go abroad in search of
monsters to destroy" and impose our values and
system on a benighted world? Are we a republic or
an empire?
Once again, it is time to choose.
We are in a unique season. The last Hanukkah of
the century is over; the last Ramadan and Christmas
season of the millennium are underway. On this eve
of a new century, let us cease to hector and
discipline the world and try to lead it; let us conform
our foreign policy to principles more becoming a
Godly nation and great republic.
