ECONOMIC SANCTIONS, JUST WAR DOCTRINE, AND THE
"FEARFUL SPECTACLE OF THE CIVILIAN DEAD"
by Joy Gordon
Sanctions, like siege, intend harm to
civilians and therefore cannot be justified as a tool of warfare.
JOY GORDON teaches in the Philosophy
Department at Fairfield University.
Economic sanctions are rapidly becoming one of the major tools of
international governance of the post-Cold War era. The UN Security
Council, empowered under Article 16 of the UN Charter to use economic
measures to address "threats of aggression" and "breaches
of peace," approved partial or comprehensive sanctions on only two
occasions from 1945 to 1990. By contrast, since 1990 the Security
Council has imposed sanctions on eleven nations, including the former
Yugoslavia, Libya, Somalia, Liberia, Haiti, and several other nations.
However, the U.S. has imposed sanctions, unilaterally or with other
nations, far more frequently than any other nation in the world, or any
multinational body in the world, including the United Nations. More than
two-thirds of the sixty-plus sanctions cases between 1945 were initiated
and maintained by the United States, and three-quarters of these cases
involved unilateral U.S. action without significant participation by
other countries.(1) Thus, while
the question of ethical legitimacy has implications for the UN
strategies of international governance, it has far greater implications
for the U.S., which uses sanctions more frequently and in many more
contexts, from trade regimes and human rights enforcement to its efforts
to maintain regional and global hegemony.
Sanctions seem to lend themselves well to international governance.
They seem more substantial than mere diplomatic protests, yet they are
politically less problematic, and less costly, than military incursions.
They are often discussed as though they were a mild sort of punishment,
not an act of aggression of the kind that has actual human costs.
Consequently, sanctions have for the most part avoided the scrutiny that
military actions would face, in the domains of both politics and ethics.
The sanctions against Iraq, and the massive, long-term human
suffering they have inflicted, have undermined this common view of
sanctions. Since 1991, international agencies have documented Iraq's
explosion in child mortality rates, water-borne diseases from untreated
water supplies, malnutrition in large sectors of the population, and on
and on. The most reliable estimate holds that 237,000 Iraqi children
under five are dead as a result of sanctions, with other estimates going
as high as one million.(2) The
deaths from sanctions are far greater than the number of Iraqis directly
killed in the Persian Gulf War -- an estimated 40,000 casualties, both
military and civilian.(3) But the
sanctions are shocking not only because of the extent of the human
damage, but also because the suffering has been borne primarily by
women, children, the elderly, the sick, and the poor; the state and the
wealthy classes seem to be inconvenienced, but are otherwise exempt from
extreme hardship.
The situation in Iraq compels us to reexamine the moral basis of
economic sanctions. Because it is now clear that sanctions can do fully
as much human damage as warfare, it seems to me critical that we begin
applying a higher level of scrutiny than has been the case since the end
of World War I. Furthermore, because sanctions are themselves a
form of violence, I would argue that they cannot legitimately be seen
merely as a peacekeeping device, or as a tool for enforcing
international law. Rather, I will suggest, they require the same level
of justification as other acts of warfare. Thus, in this essay, I will
look at principles of Just War Doctrine, applicable in the case of Iraq,
but I will also look at Just War Doctrine as it applies to sanctions
generally, even where the human consequences are less extreme than those
in Iraq.
I will argue that economic sanctions violate Just War principles of
both jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Jus ad bellum
requires that a belligerent party have valid grounds for engaging in
warfare, whereas jus in bello requires that the war be fought
in accordance with certain standards of conduct. To engage in warfare at
all, the belligerent party must have a just cause. "Just
cause" requires "a real and certain danger," such as
protecting innocent life, preserving conditions necessary for decent
human existence, and securing basic human rights.(4)
Secondly, under the requirement of proportionality, the damage inflicted
"must not be greater than the damage prevented or the offense being
avenged."(5) Finally, there
must be a probability of success. The "probability of success"
criterion prohibits resort to force when the outcome will be futile.(6)
In the case of Iraq, the initial justification for sanctions was
Iraq's incursion into Kuwait. Yet, the invasion of Kuwait clearly had a
human cost that was far less than the casualties from sanctions;
estimates range as high as 20,000 Kuwaiti casualties (combined military
and civilian). Furthermore, it has been eight years since Iraq withdrew;
thus the sanctions can no longer be justified as a means of stopping a
present act of aggression. The current justification for sanctions is
that Iraq possesses the means to produce chemical and biological
weapons. However, it is not clear that this meets the proportionality
test. Although they are called "weapons of mass destruction,"
biological and chemical weapons, in contrast to nuclear weapons, are not
in fact prohibited for the scale of harm done, but for the type of
suffering they cause to individuals and its indiscriminate character. In
any event, according to UNSCOM's claims, Iraq is not currently using any
such weapons and is not actually accused of possessing the weapons
themselves, but only of possessing the means to produce them. It is hard
to see how a quarter million civilian deaths is a proportional response
not to any present act of aggression, but something fairly far removed
from that -- the possession of the means to produce weapons which might
do indiscriminate harm, if they are constructed, and if
they are then used. Yet, to constitute "just cause," the
offense must be "actual, not only possible," according to
Yoder.(7)
If we were to hold that possession of such weapons itself justifies
retaliation against an entire population, then there is a larger
problem. Virtually every country in the world, including many other
countries in unstable regions, possess such means, if not the actual
weapons themselves. Chemical and biological weapons are notoriously easy
to produce; they require little more than a college chemistry lab. Any
country which produces pharmaceuticals, or for that matter pesticides,
possesses the means to produce chemical and biological weapons.
Furthermore, in practice, their use has by no means been consistently
treated by the world community as a war crime. There was no such
response, for example, to the widespread use of Agent Orange, a
biological weapon, by the U.S. throughout the Vietnam War.
The "probability of success" criterion is likewise
problematic in the case of Iraq. After eight years, it is hard to see
how one could plausibly claim that sanctions are likely to succeed in
achieving various changes in Iraq state policies, including the removal
of Saddam Hussein, given that, to date, they have been so patently
ineffectual.(8) Sanctions are
notorious for their low rate of success in achieving political goals.
The most extensive study of sanctions episodes in this century estimates
that sanctions are "a factor" in achieving the target state's
compliance about one-third of the time.(9)
But even this figure has been challenged as far too optimistic.(10)
The typical response of a people in the face of sanctions is in fact to
"rally 'round the flag," and support the leadership in the
face of foreign coercion.(11)
That response has characterized sanctions situations from Italian
support for Mussolini in the face of the League of Nations' boycott and
Serbian support of Slobodan Milosevic, to the U.S. response to the Arab
oil boycott of the 1970s. The situations where outside sanctions
actually help erode the internal legitimacy of the state, such as in
South Africa, are infrequent.
In South Africa, for example, the external sanctions imposed on the
country were accompanied by extensive political activity toward
democracy inside South Africa. The sanctions were also explicitly
supported by several sectors of the black population, the population
hardest hit by the sanctions. The first factor contributed directly to
the end of apartheid, and it is not clear whether the changes which
finally took place were attributable to the sanctions themselves, or to
the political movements within and outside the country. The second
factor changes the ethical context, since there was explicit, informed
consent by those harmed. It seems to me that the example of South Africa
does not offer a justification of sanctions that extends beyond the
particulars of that situation, any more than a boxer who consents to
risk being harmed in a fight provides a general justification for other
kinds of assault, including assault against nonconsenting individuals.
Thus, sanctions do not appear to be morally defensible in the ways
they have been used against Iraq, under the principle of jus ad
bellum. But of course the issues of proportionality and just cause
will vary from situation to situation. It is conceivable within this
framework that if the cause were different, if the sanctions were less
extreme, and if they were more efficacious, there could well be a
situation where it would be permissible to engage in warring acts,
including sanctions. However, I would suggest in this case, sanctions
are inherently indefensible as a means of conducting warfare.
The jus in bello principle of discrimination holds that the
means used for warfare must not be indiscriminate. The means used
"must respect the immunity of the innocent," where
"innocent" refers to "those who are no threat." This
encompasses (1) women, children, the aged, infirm; (2) clergy,
religious, foreigners; (3) unarmed persons going about their
ordinary vocations; and (4) soldiers on leave or who have become
prisoners. "Innocent does not mean that persons are not
patriotic, do not morally support the war effort, or do not participate
in the wartime economy, but only that they are no threat, are not
combatant."(12)
The principle of discrimination in Just War Doctrine requires the
attacker to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants; between
combatants who are injured and those who are uninjured; between
combatants who are armed and those who have surrendered and are
defenseless; etc.(13) Under
Just War Doctrine, there is no strict prohibition against killing
civilians, or killing injured or unarmed combatants, when it is required
by "military necessity" or as an unavoidable consequence of an
attack on a legitimate military target. A common example is that an
ammunition factory is a legitimate military target in wartime; if in
bombing the factory, civilians who live nearby are also killed, no war
crime has been committed. What is prohibited is to target civilians
directly, or injured or defenseless combatants; or to bomb
indiscriminately, where the deaths of civilians are foreseeable.
As Walzer notes, siege is the oldest form of war waged against both
soldiers and civilians. In siege, noncombatants are not only exposed,
but in fact are more likely to be killed than combatants, given that the
goal of siege "is surrender, not by defeat of the enemy army, but
by the fearful spectacle of the civilian dead."(14)
Thus, siege warfare has the quality of actually inverting the principle
of discrimination. Siege operates by restricting the economy of the
entire community, creating shortages of food, water, and fuel. Those who
are least able to survive the ensuing hunger, illness, and cold are the
very young, the elderly, and those who are sick or injured. Thus the
direct consequence of siege is that harm is done to those who are least
able to defend themselves, who present the least military threat, who
have the least input into policy or military decisions, and who are most
vulnerable to hunger, cold, and illness. The harm done by the enemy's
deprivation is exacerbated by domestic policy, which typically shifts
whatever resources there are to the military and to the political
leadership. This is sometimes done for security reasons, in the belief
that defending against military attack is the highest priority, and is
more immediately urgent than the slower damage of hunger and illness to
which the civilian population is subjected. It may also happen because
the leadership is corrupt, or because the desperation creates conditions
for black marketeering. Both of these consequences -- the suffering of
the innocent and helpless, and the shifting of resources to the military
and to the privileged -- are as old as siege itself. In a siege,
civilians and
soldiers are exposed to the same risks. Scarcity and proximity make them
equally vulnerable. Or perhaps not equally so: in this kind of war, once
combat begins, noncombatants are more likely to be killed. The soldiers
fight from protected positions, and the civilians, who don't fight at
all, are quickly made over. . . into "useless
mouths." Fed last, and only with the army's surplus, they die
first.(15)
In addition, although the harm to the civilian population is slower
than that done by warfare, it is not necessarily any less severe. Walzer
quotes a passage from an account of the Roman siege of Jerusalem:
The restraint of
liberty to pass in and out of the city took from the Jews all hope of
safety, and the famine now increasing consumed whole households and
families; and the houses were full of dead women and infants; and the
streets filed with the dead bodies of old men. And the young men,
swollen like dead men's shadows, walked in the market place and fell
down dead where it happened. And now the multitude of dead bodies was so
great that they that were alive could not bury them, nor cared they for
burying them. . . And those who were yet living, without tears
beheld those who being dead were now at rest before them. There was no
noise heard from within the city. . .(16)
Thus, the argument can be made that siege has the character of being
a form of warfare which itself constitutes a war crime. By its very
nature, it is easily foreseeable or calculated to cause direct
harm to those who are, in Just War Doctrine, supposed to be exempt from
warfare -- the apolitical and the unarmed -- in order to influence indirectly
those who are armed and those who are responsible for military and
political decisions. Let us place siege in the context of war crimes and
Just War Doctrine: in Just War Doctrine, we could demand a justification
for a military strategy in terms of the obligation to minimize harm to
civilians -- the ammunition factory was a legitimate target, and there
was no way to bomb it without collateral damage to nearby residential
areas. But siege is peculiar in that it resists such an analysis -- the
immediate goal is precisely to cause suffering to civilians. In
the case of the ammunitions factory, we can answer the question: How is
this act consistent with the moral requirement to discriminate? In the
case of siege, we cannot.
It may be argued that military necessity sometimes justifies the use
of siege warfare, and that in this case, military necessity overrides
the principle of discrimination. "Military necessity" is
sometimes defined as consisting of acts "which are indispensable
for securing the complete submission of the enemy as soon as
possible," according to a version of the U.S. Army Field Manual.
Alternatively, military necessity is sometimes understood to include, by
definition, whatever limitations are required by international law,
including humanitarian principles and the principle of discrimination.(17)
If military necessity legitimizes any act of war, then the principle of
discrimination becomes a luxury rather than a limitation of military
conduct; it would hold only that one may not target civilians
gratuitously. On the other hand, if military necessity is constrained by
the principle of discrimination, then one may not target civilians, even
where it would be of great value to the war effort. The "unanswered
question," however, "is whether the function of laws of war is
to protect all militarily necessary acts or to serve as a judge of those
militarily necessary acts that should be forbidden," given that
"there is a widespread suspicion that there really are no laws of
war. After all, the Hague Conventions were prefaced by the formula, 'if
military circumstances permit,' and the Conventions of Geneva provided
that nations could renounce them."(18)
It is sometimes said that military necessity is the exception that
swallows Just War Doctrine altogether, since virtually anything can be
justified -- by the party doing it -- as having a military purpose. An
argument can be made, at least by the acting party, that there are
circumstances in which it would be militarily necessary to demoralize
the civilian population by conducting carpet bombing as a method of
psychological warfare, or as a means of undermining the entire
industrial base and labor force upon which military production depends.
If military necessity can legitimate harm directly and intentionally
done to civilians, then it is true that siege can invoke this
justification; but if so, then the principle of discrimination has been
lost altogether. If the principle of discrimination is to have any
meaning at all, then directly harming children, the sick, and the
elderly, in order to indirectly influence military and political
leaders, must be ethically precluded, and this preclusion must not be
overridden by a claim of military necessity. The alternative -- to hold
that military necessity can legitimize direct and intentional harm to
civilians -- is effectively to take a realist or nihilist position that
ethical restraint has no place in war. But while that position would be
available to those engaged in warfare, it would seem to be unavailable
to those seeking to impose or justify sanctions on such grounds as
international law or human rights, since these claims themselves invoke
a legal and ethical framework.
In certain respects, sanctions are obviously the modern version of
siege warfare -- each involves the systematic deprivation of a whole
city or nation of economic resources. Although in siege warfare this is
accomplished by surrounding the city with an army, the same effect can
be achieved by using international institutions and international
pressure to prevent the sale or purchase of goods, and to prevent
migration. It is sometimes argued that an embargoed nation can still
engage in some marginal trade, despite sanctions; but similarly in a
siege there may be marginal ways of getting goods through gaps in the
blockade. In both cases, however, the unit under embargo or siege is a
mixed population rather than a military installation, or is entirely
civilian. In both cases, the net effect is the same, which is the
disruption or strangulation of the economy as a whole.(19)
Christiansen and Powers argue that the Just War Doctrine, which holds
that civilians and noncombatants should be immune from direct attack,
does not apply to peacetime sanctions in the same way that this doctrine
applies to sieges and blockades imposed as part of a war effort.(20)
Scholars in the Just War tradition, they note, "often treat
economic sanctions as analogous with acts of war. . . along
with blockades and sieges."(21)
However, Christiansen and Powers argue that sanctions without war have a
different moral status, for three reasons: first, unlike wartime
blockades, economic sanctions are not imposed as a form of war, but as
an alternative to warfare; second, some kinds of harms may in fact be
justified, either because the population has consented to the state's
policies or because it shares responsibility for them in some fashion;
and third, with appropriate humanitarian measures built in, the harm
inflicted by sanctions is not as extreme as the harm done by war.(22)
The fundamental difference, they hold, is that the use of economic
sanctions is rooted in the intention to avoid the use of armed force, as
opposed to the intent to multiply the effects of war; and that as a
lower-level exercise of coercion, it raises the threshold for the use of
actual force, thereby lowering the likelihood of actual warfare.(23)
To some extent, their reasons reiterate the same arguments made by
others -- that sanctions are less harsh than warfare; that the
population consented to, or for other reasons can properly be held
responsible for, the acts of the leadership; that structuring in
humanitarian exceptions will prevent sanctions from causing death or
great suffering. I have addressed these issues elsewhere.(24)
Here I want to look at Christiansen and Powers to draw a distinction
between sanctions-as-war and sanctions-without-war. The distinction does
not resolve the underlying question: Are sanctions a device that keeps
the peace and enforces international law, or are they intrinsically a
form of violence, which in fact violates the laws of warfare? Woodrow
Wilson, in urging the adoption of sanctions as a method by which the
League of Nations would keep the world free of war, described them as a
"peaceful, silent, deadly remedy." And indeed, before the Iraq
situation showed us how extensive and extreme the human damage from
sanctions can be, economic sanctions were most commonly portrayed in the
U.S. as a kind of stern but peaceful act -- a punishment which
inconveniences or embarrasses, but does no damage of the sort that
raises moral issues. In fact, it was the peace activists who, in 1990,
were in the forefront arguing that sanctions be used in the case of Iraq
rather than military undertakings.
Like many other commentators, Christiansen and Powers are partly
basing their claim on two sets of empirical assumptions regarding the
speed and degree of damage done by sanctions: "Whereas war's impact
is speedy and frequently lethal, the impact of sanctions grows over time
and allows more easily for mitigation of these harmful effects and for a
negotiated solution than acts of war."(25)
Christiansen and Powers suggest that the way to conceptualize sanctions
is that warfare is akin to the death penalty, whereas sanctions are more
like attaching someone's assets in a civil proceeding.(26)
In this analogy, the economic domain is seen as fully separate, and of a
different nature altogether, than the domain of power and of violence.
But economic harm, while it is not directly physical, can also be a form
of violence. The sanctions-as-mere-seizure-of-assets theory, whether on
the level of the individual or an entire economy, implicitly assumes a
starting point of relative abundance. Whether the seizure of someone's
assets is inconvenient or devastating depends entirely on what their
assets are, and how much is left after the seizure. For an
upper-middle-class person with, say, $50,000 in stocks and an annual
income of $80,000, seizing $1000 from a checking account would at most
cause inconvenience, annoyance, perhaps some slight reduction in
luxuries or indulgences. For someone living at poverty level, seizing
$1000 may mean that a family has lost irreplaceably the ability to pay
for fuel oil for a winter's heating season, or lost their car in a rural
area with no other transportation, or lost the security deposit and
first month's rent on an apartment that would have given them a way out
of a homeless shelter. Living in a home with a temperature of 40 degrees
in the winter does not kill quickly, in the way that a bullet does, and
may not kill at all. It may only make someone sick, or over some time,
worsen an illness until death occurs. Living in a shelter or on the
street for a night or for a week or for a month doesn't kill in the way
that a bullet does, but it exposes someone to a risk of considerable
random violence, including killings. To conceptualize economic
deprivation in terms of mild punishment whose effects are reversible
with no permanent damage -- inconvenience, embarrassment, living on a
budget -- is to misunderstand the nature of the economic. "Economic
deprivation" is not a uniform phenomenon; the loss of conveniences
constitutes a different experience than the loss of the means to meet
basic needs. There is a reason that infant mortality rates and life
expectancy rates are used as measures of economic development: poverty
manifests itself in malnutrition, sickness, exposure to the elements,
exhaustion, dirty drinking water, the lack of means to leave a violent
country or neighborhood -- the shortening of one's life. It is for this
reason that liberation theologians and others have argued that poverty
is indeed a form of violence, although it doesn't kill in the way that a
bullet does.
Christiansen and Powers argue that sanctions differ from siege partly
on the grounds that the intent of sanctions is to prevent violence
rather than exacerbate it. Under the doctrine of double effect, however,
this does not seem to hold. The doctrine of double effect provides that
the foreseen evil
effect of a man's action is not morally imputable to him, provided that
(1) the action in itself is directed immediately to some other
result, (2) the evil effect is not willed either in itself or as a
means to the other result, (3) the permitting of the evil effect is
justified by reasons of proportionate weight.(27)
Although the doctrine of double effect would seem to justify
"collateral damage," it does not offer a justification of
sanctions. "Collateral damage" entails the unintended
secondary harm to civilians. If a bombing raid is conducted against a
military base, the collateral damage would be that the schoolhouse half
a mile away was destroyed by a bomb that missed its intended target,
which was the military base. In that case, the bombing raid would be
equally successful if the base were hit, and the schoolhouse were
undamaged. But the damage done by indirect sanctions is not in fact
"collateral," in that the damage to the civilian population is
necessary and instrumental. The direct damage to the economy is
intended to indirectly influence the leadership, by triggering
political pressure or uprisings of the civilians, or by generating moral
guilt from the "fearful spectacle of the civilian dead."
Sanctions directed against an economy would in fact be considered
unsuccessful if no disruption of the economy took place. We often hear
commentators objecting that "sanctions didn't work" in one
situation or another because they weren't "tight" enough --
they did not succeed in disrupting the economy. Thus, sanctions are not
defensible under the doctrine of double effect. Although the end may
indeed be legitimate, the intended intermediate means consists of the
generalized damage to the economy, which violates both the first and
second requirements of the doctrine. But there is a second reason why
good intent can not available as a justification for sanctions: the
intent cannot in good faith be reconciled with the history and the logic
of sanctions, and with the likely outcome. We know from the history of
siege warfare that, legitimately or not, in the face of economic
strangulation, the military and political leadership will insulate
themselves from its consequences, and place a disproportionate burden on
the civilian population. We also know from history that economic
strangulation will consolidate the state's power rather than undermine
it; we know that sanctions are, for the most part, unlikely to prevent
military aggression, or stop human rights violations, or achieve
compliance with any political or military demand, even when
sanctions drag on for decades. It is hard to reconcile the claimed
"good intent" of sanctions with a history that makes it easy
to foresee that those intentions are not likely to be realized. Thus, I
would suggest that while sanctions may have very different goals than
siege warfare -- including goals such as international governance --
they are nevertheless subject to many of the same moral objections: that
they intentionally, or at least predictably, harm the most vulnerable
and the least political; and that this is something which the party
imposing sanctions either knows, or should know. To the extent that
economic sanctions seek to undermine the economy of a society, and
thereby prevent the production or importation of necessities, they are
functioning as the modern equivalent of siege. To the extent that
sanctions deprive the most vulnerable and least political sectors of
society of the food, potable water, medical care, and fuel necessary for
survival and basic human needs, sanctions should be subject to the same
moral objections as siege warfare.
I do not deny that the contexts in which sanctions and sieges occur
may be different, the intent of each may differ, the nature of the
demands may be different, and the options of the besieged or sanctioned
states may be different. But the moral objection to sanctions does not
rest on the analogy; sanctions do not have to be identical to siege
warfare in order to be subject to condemnation under just war
principles. Indeed, if the intent of sanctions is peaceful rather than
belligerent, then the usual justifications in warfare are unavailable. I
am morally permitted to kill where my survival is at stake; and in war,
I am morally permitted to kill even innocents, in some circumstances.
But if one's goal is to see that international law is enforced or that
human rights are respected, then the stakes and the justificatory
context are quite different. It is hard to make sense of the claim that
"collateral damage" can be justified in the name of protecting
human rights; or that international law might be enforced by means that
stand in violation of international laws, including the just war
principle of discrimination. Thus, if sanctions are analogous to siege
warfare, then they are problematic for the same reasons -- both
effectively violate the principle of discrimination. But if sanctions
are not analogous to siege, then sanctions are even more problematic. If
the goals of sanctions are the enforcement of humanitarian standards or
compliance with legal and ethical norms, then extensive and predictable
harm to civilians cannot even be justified by reference to survival or
military advantage. Insofar as this is the case, sanctions are simply a
device of cruelty garbed in self-righteousness.
To the extent that we see sanctions as a means of peacekeeping and
international governance, sanctions effectively escape ethical analysis
-- we do not judge them by the same standards we judge other kinds of
harm done to innocents. Yet, concretely, the hunger, sickness, and
poverty which are ostensibly inflicted for benign purposes affect
individuals no differently than hunger, sickness, and poverty inflicted
out of malevolence. To describe sanctions as a means of
"peacekeeping" or "enforcing human rights" is an
ideological move, which, from the perspective of concrete personal
experiences, is simply counterfactual. Sanctions are, at bottom, a
bureaucratized, internationally organized form of siege warfare, and
should be seen, and judged, as such.
Notes
1. [Back to text]
"Economic Sanctions in Contemporary Global Relations," George A.
Lopez and David Cortright, in Economic Sanctions: Panacea or
Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold War World?, ed. George A. Lopez
and David Cortright (Boulder: Westview, 1995), 5. These figures are
consistent with the most extensive database regarding sanctions in the
twentieth century, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 2d ed.
(Washington D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990), ed. Gary
Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott.
Elliott notes (in 1995, after the second edition was published), that:
"Of 104 sanctions episodes from World War II through the UN
embargo of Iraq, the United States was a key player in two-thirds. In 80
percent of U.S.-imposed sanctions, the policy was pursued with no more
than minor cooperation from its allies or international
organizations." "Factors Affecting the Success of
Sanctions," Kimberly Ann Elliott, in Economic Sanctions, 51.
2. [Back to text]
Richard Garfield, "Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children
from 1990 to 1998: Assessing the Impact of Economic Sanctions,"
Occasional Paper no. 16:OP:3, Joan B. Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies, University of Notre Dame, 1. Note that this
figure does not include the adult deaths resulting from the sanctions,
for which figures are generally not given because of the difficulty of
documenting specific sources of mortality using the methods applicable
to infants and young children.
3. [Back to text] See
also Garfield's summary of measurements of Gulf War mortality in
"Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi Children from 1990 to
1998," 17.
4. [Back to text] U.S.
Catholic Bishops, "The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our
Response," May 1983 pastoral letter, in Malham M. Wakin, ed., War,
Morality, and the Military Profession, 2d ed. (Boulder: Westview
Press, 1986), 245-46.
5. [Back to text] John
Howard Yoder, When War is Unjust (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books,
1996), 156.
8. [Back to text] I will
not address here the question of the legitimacy of particular political
goals, such as the removal of a country's leader from office.
10. [Back to text]
Robert Pape argues that in most of these cases, there were other factors
as well as sanctions, such as military actions, such that it is
impossible to say with any certainty what role was played by the
sanctions themselves. In only about 5 percent of the situations was
there some political change could clearly be attributed directly to
sanctions. "Why Economic Sanctions Do Not Work," International
Security 22, no. 2 (Fall 1997).
11. [Back to text]
Johann Galtung's work in the 1960s has been widely cited in this regard.
See, for example, Ivan Eland's comment that "Galtung used the term
rally-around-the-flag effect to argue that leaders in target nations
could use the economic pain caused by foreign nations to rally their
populations around their cause. Rather than creating disintegration in
the target state, sanctions would invoke nationalism and political
integration." Ivan Eland, "Economic Sanctions as Tools of
Foreign Policy," in Economic Sanctions, 32.
12. [Back to text]
Yoder, When War is Unjust, 157. Yoder notes that the clarity of
this definition "has recently been compromised, though not
logically set aside, by the notion of a quasi-combatant work
force." But this is exactly the heart of the issue: if the economy
as a whole supports the military or the political leadership -- even if
it is just by having roads which the military uses, along with everyone
else; or even if it is just by feeding the civilian populace, which
frees up food for the soldiers -- then, the argument goes, the economy
itself is fair game.
13. [Back to text] See
generally Ian Clark, Waging War: A Philosophical Introduction
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 87-97; James Turner Johnson, Just
War Tradition and the Restraint of War (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1981); and Telford Taylor, "War Crimes," in Nuremberg
and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (New York: Times Books, 1970).
14. [Back to text]
Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 2d ed. (Glenview, Ill.:
Basic Books, 1977).
16. [Back to text]
Walzer, 161, citing The Works of Josephus, trans. Tho. Lodge
(London 1620): The Wars of the Jews, Bk. VI, ch. XIV, 721
17. [Back to text]
Robert L. Holmes, On War and Morality, (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1989), 101-6; William O'Brien, The
Conduct of Just and Limited War (New York: Praeger, 1981), 64-67;
Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War, 86-94.
18. [Back to text]
"Military Necessity," An Encyclopedia of War and Ethics,
ed. Donald A. Wells (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1996), 306.
19. [Back to text]
This article does not address the implications of "smart
sanctions," which are those that affect only the military and
political leadership, such as the seizure of foreign bank accounts of
individual leaders. Obviously such sanctions do not raise any of the
same ethical issues. However, the fact that it may be possible to target
sanctions in this way does not in any way resolve the ethical problems
raised by sanctions which are not "smart," and do affect an
economy as a whole.
20. [Back to text]
Drew Christiansen, S.J., and Gerard F. Powers, "Economic
Sanctions and Just-War Doctrine," in Economic Sanctions, 102.
22. [Back to text]
Ibid., 103. Interestingly, John C. Scharfen, a military theorist,
takes the opposite view in The Dismal Battlefield: Mobilizing for
Economic Conflict (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1995):
"Economic force produces casualties," he says bluntly.
"The collateral damage is almost always indiscriminate," 4.
There may be political reasons to use different terms, but, he suggests,
that is just a matter of rhetoric. "Economic war implies
aggression on the part of those who employ the economic weapon. It is a
term favored by the target of that force and those moralists who would
class the use of the economic instrument as unscrupulous. Economic
sanctions is a milder term and one favored by those employing the
instrument," 8.
23. [Back to text]
Christiansen and Powers, "Economic Sanctions and Just-War
Doctrine," 103.
24. [Back to text]
"Peaceful, Silent, Deadly Remedy: The Ethics of Economic
Sanctions," Ethics and International Affairs 13: 1999.
25. [Back to text]
Christiansen and Powers, "Economic Sanctions and Just-War
Doctrine," 107.
27. [Back to text]
John C. Ford, S.J., "The Morality of Obliteration
Bombing," in War and Morality, ed. Richard A.
Wasserstrom (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970), 26.
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