By Satya Hiru Patel

In a perfect world, people wouldn’t be deprived of basic needs or opportunities. There would be food and medicine, shelter and clothing, and education and jobs for everyone throughout the world. Unfortunately, this isn’t the reality for people living in the roughly 30 countries under sanctions by the U.S. When a country like Cuba or Iraq strays too far from the international mainstream and begins to pose a threat to international peace and security, sanctions are often imposed to change the behavior of the government or regime. The question is – how effective are sanctions in accomplishing their desired ends?

When sanctions are imposed on a country, a variety of things may happen. Foreign aid may be reduced or cut off, although the penalties can be much more substantial. In the case of Cuba, for example, the U.S. unilaterally imposed a total trade and financial embargo against the country. Until last year, Iraq was also subject to strong sanctions imposed multi-laterally by the United Nations, which are more comprehensive and devastating to civilians. Too often, though, penalties aimed at the powerful have their worst effect on the powerless.

Millions of nameless, faceless people have suffered the brunt of economic sanctions. Too often, sanctions hurt large numbers of people who are not its primary target. Not only the victims of their own governments’ mistreatment, civilians become the victims the sanctions that are meant to punish those in power.

Perhaps the worst suffering came in Iraq. Because so much of Iraq’s terrain is desert, the country has always relied heavily on food imports. After the Gulf War, Iraq’s economy and infrastructure were crippled, and the Iraqi people were plagued by famine and epidemic. According to Kimberly Elliott, research fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington (D.C.), the Oil-for-Food Program was implemented to alleviate their suffering and help feed millions of people. “Clearly there were severe civilian impacts in Iraq,” Elliot said. “Oil-for-Food was an important mechanism for at least mitigating this.”

Statistics paint a grim picture of Iraq. The UN estimates that 5,000 children under the age of five died every month due to sanctions. Says Elliott, “The U.S. principally undermined the program to some degree by being overly restrictive on what kinds of dual use products they would allow and they let the approval process drag out too long. But in a case like Iraq, it’s clear that the stakes are high and the risk is real.”

Sanctions clearly hamstrung the Iraqi economy, cutting it roughly in half after the Gulf War. What resulted was a subsistence economy. And while Saddam Hussein illicitly benefited from oil revenues, the Oil-for-Food Program only provided the minimum level of food needed by the Iraqi population, and came up short in getting essential medicines to people.

While sanctions have unintentionally brought great suffering to millions of people, their effectiveness at corralling rogue governments and dictators remains questionable. “Overall, they have not been very effective in changing regimes,” says Elliott. “U.S. sanctions versus Iran have had little impact in reducing the impact of conservative leaders. They clearly failed in Iraq, and they failed in Cuba.” In fact, Elliot said that only one in three sanctions have had some degree of success.

Worse yet, sanctions on one country can dramatically affect the economies of its neighbors and trading partners. When sanctions were leveled against Iraq in the early 1990’s, every nation in the region suffered. Turkey, for example, had been a conduit on an oil pipeline, earning substantial transfer fees in the process. However, with sanctions in place, these revenues were lost, inevitably hurting Turkish workers. More recently, Eastern European countries have emerged from years of turmoil and began to integrate their markets. To complicate this difficult task, their major trading partners on the Danube River, Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, have been saddled with sanctions.

Sanctions are just one of many options available to the U.S. and UN to bring wayward nations back into the international mainstream. “Diplomacy may work in some cases, and elsewhere, military action may be inevitable,” says Elliott. Because they are a middle-of-the-road option, sanctions are not going to go away. Unfortunately, in many countries under sanctions, the plight of civilians may only fan the flame of anti-American sentiment. Elliot argues that there must, therefore, be incentives - carrots along with sticks, so that if a country changes its behavior, sanctions should be slackened and opportunities granted improving the lives of the citizens.

One wonders, however whether sanctions are the way to go. They rarely succeed in bringing about political change in a country and they harm millions of normal people who are already being victimized by their government. The seriousness of food and medicine shortages and the crippling effect on people’s lives, although unintended consequences of sanctions, cannot be downplayed. The U.S. and UN were founded on beacon idealism, and yet our sanctions punish innocent civilians for the sins of their leaders.