Unthinkable (24 page)

MORE SANCTIONS?
In the end, it is the sanctions that got us to the current point. To the extent that it is now possible to imagine that Iran might accept real constraints on its nuclear program, it is because of the sanctions. Especially because of the uncertainties of covert action, if Iran does not respond to renewed offers of engagement and tangible benefits, we will inevitably have to turn to sanctions once again to try to achieve that objective.

There are two ways to think about ratcheting up sanctions on Iran. To borrow phrases from the military, they are either “vertical” or “horizontal” escalation. Vertical escalation of the sanctions would refer to clamping down even harder on Iranian commerce. The problem is that we are already maxed out at this point. Other than exporting humanitarian goods such as food and medicine to Iran, all American commerce with Iran is prohibited. The same is largely true for Europe. Even the French, the hardest of the hard line when it comes to Iran, confess that there isn't much more that Europe can do. The last sanction that they are holding in reserve is to forbid Iran from conducting transactions in euros with non-EU countries, a move that would hurt Iran, but probably not enough to convince them to change their minds. Paris feels the need to have at least one more sanction available in the event that Iran refuses the P-5+1 again, but the French do not seem sanguine that it will make much difference.

That's where horizontal escalation comes in. Horizontal escalation would mean convincing other countries to join the current Western
sanctions. Because there is so little left in terms of vertical escalation, any further intensification of sanctions will need to focus on horizontal escalation. To this end, in late 2012, conservative American congressmen began working on what they referred to as “comprehensive commercial sanctions” against Iran. These sanctions would seize or freeze all Iranian assets overseas and prohibit all imports into Iran except for food, medicine, and some communications equipment (to help Iran's pro-democracy opposition). Under this legislation, any country that refused to comply with its terms would be banned from trading with the United States.
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If this legislation were enacted and enforced, and if other countries complied with it, it would re-create the same draconian, comprehensive sanctions on Iran that the United Nations imposed on Iraq during the 1990s.

CAN THE SANCTIONS WORK?
In recent decades, when the United States has levied economic sanctions against countries, we have tended to do so expecting the psychological blow from the mere imposition of these penalties to be enough to cause the targeted state to reverse course. When the United States led the international community in imposing sanctions on Iraq to try to force Saddam Husayn to give up his WMD programs in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War, the resolutions naïvely included a 145-day clock for him to do so.

Sanctions do not work this way in practice. To the extent that Saddam complied with the resolutions (and he did comply with the spirit of the resolutions, although he refused to acknowledge that he had), it seems to have taken him four to five years. Even then he never complied with the letter of the resolutions and intended to violate their spirit as soon as the sanctions were lifted.
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With Iran we have once again imposed crippling sanctions in the expectation that the Iranian regime won't want to allow their economy to erode (or perhaps even collapse). We have done so under the assumption that long before that point, Tehran will agree to change its behavior on one of its most important policies to accommodate American (and global)
demands. The problem is that, historically, sanctions don't work that way. Richard Haass has proven himself to be both one of the ablest policymakers and most accomplished foreign policy thinkers of the past thirty years, and it is telling that he concluded his own study of the utility of sanctions for American diplomacy by observing that sanctions “are unlikely to achieve desired results if the aims are large or the time is short.”
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Sanctions have an uneven record in general. Former undersecretary of state for economic affairs Stuart Eizenstat found that “[s]anctions offer a decidedly mixed bag of beneficial and damaging results to policymakers.”
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Academic work on sanctions has largely borne this out.
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A famous 1990 study of 115 cases of sanctions found that they “worked” only 34 percent of the time.
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Daniel Drezner has pointed out what he calls the “sanctions paradox,” in which sanctions work best when the target country is a democracy and an ally of the sanctioning state.
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Neither is the case for Iran. Although sanctions rarely succeed on their own in coercing a nation to change its behavior, they can often accomplish other, lesser goals, such as weakening the target state or forcing it to curb its activities. Moreover, sanctions can be helpful in laying the predicate for even harsher measures—typically military—by demonstrating that the targeted state cannot be persuaded by anything short of force. Of course, for the case at hand, sanctions are only
useful
in this last way if we are looking to go to war with Iran. If we aren't, and I am not, this last point does little good.

The work on sanctions most relevant to our current impasse with Iran remains Meghan O'Sullivan's 2002 book,
Shrewd Sanctions,
which looked at four cases of sanctions against Middle Eastern rogue regimes (including Iran) during the 1990s. O'Sullivan, who would go on to senior positions in the Bush 43 administration, including deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan during the surge in Iraq, demonstrated that “[s]anctions whose primary aim is to change certain behaviors of a leadership are in some respects the most difficult to fashion.”
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In which case, “[t]he structure of sanctions must be flexible enough to accommodate
and encourage gradual changes in the behavior of the target, ideally by allowing restrictions to be lifted or letting them lapse incrementally as the country takes actions desired by the United States. . . . Sanctions used for this purpose must be accompanied by a dialogue between the two countries, preferably in a regular and institutionalized way that allows each side to articulate its expectations and demonstrate the reforms it has undertaken. . . .”
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That we have none of that with Iran might make us skeptical that our current sanctions will work at all, let alone quickly.

What all of this work demonstrates is that sanctions only rarely cause a
major
shift in the targeted state's behavior. And when they do work, they take years, even decades, to do so. Libya was a charter member of the U.S. terrorism list in 1979 and came under a set of sanctions associated with that list. Between 1986 and 1996, the Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton administrations shut down all American commerce with Libya and began to press other countries to do the same. By the end of the Clinton administration and the start of the Bush 43 administration, Qadhafi had taken some steps to try to get back into the good graces of the United States: He had closed terrorist training camps, severed Libyan support for radical groups, and was even trying to play peacemaker in Africa. In September 2000, he gave a speech announcing his desire to rejoin the international community. In December 2003, after months of secret negotiations with the United States and Great Britain (and following the rapid American military campaigns against Afghanistan and Iraq), Qadhafi announced that he would abandon all of his WMD programs and permit international inspectors full access to all of his WMD facilities to verify his compliance; he even created a $2.7 billion compensation fund for victims of the Pan Am 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. Libya was ultimately a major success for American policy, but it took decades and may have required the collapse of the Soviet Union (Libya's former superpower patron) and the threat of an American invasion, on top of sanctions, to produce that result.
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And Libya is tiny compared to Iran: in 2004 it had one-fifteenth of Iran's current population and one-thirteenth of Iran's gross domestic product.

Sanctions can be difficult to sustain over time, something Iran's hardliners are betting on. A big problem with sanctions is that once Country A has imposed sanctions on Country B, Country A can end up fighting with its allies and trade partners, rather than with Country B. All through the 1990s and 2000s, the United States fought with its European and East Asian trading partners over their commercial relations with Iraq, Iran, Libya, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, and so on. The fights sometimes became vicious and distracting, and created rifts between the United States and our key allies when we most needed to be working in lockstep.
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In 2012, the United States imposed sanctions on Chinese, Singaporean, and UAE companies for their relations with Iran, all of which created as many problems for Washington's relations with Beijing, Singapore, and Abu Dhabi as they did for Iran's economy.
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It is especially problematic with a major oil producer like Iran, where efforts to limit its oil sales can have an impact on the price of oil—and through it the global economy. In October 2011, Khajehpour estimated that the Iran sanctions then imposed had boosted global oil prices by $8 per barrel while oil analyst Bob McNally's estimate in 2012 was a similar $5–10 per barrel.
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For the target state, undermining the sanctions is often its principal goal, and it will devote all of its political and economic energy to do so. Just as frequently, maintaining the sanctions is just one of many things to which the states applying the sanctions must attend. For that reason, even bigger and more powerful states may find it hard to sustain tight sanctions around smaller countries over time. Iraq during the 1990s is an obvious example, but the same problem has already begun with Iran. Ironically, it is often Iraqi banks and smugglers who are helping Tehran to bust the financial and oil sanctions.
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By early 2013, U.S. government officials warned that Iran was finding ways to get around the financial sanctions by using fake financial institutions, informal couriers, and criminal enterprises—all practices that Tehran will doubtless expand.
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ARE WE REPEATING THE MISTAKES OF IRAQ?
Hopefully, just suggesting that we are following the same course we took with Iraq will sound
a cautionary note. The effects of our policy toward Iraq after 1982 have been complicated. There were things that we did that worked out the way that we hoped, and other things that did not. The story of the containment and sanctions against Saddam were part of that complicated history. The combination of sanctions and inspections did convince Saddam, eventually, to give up his WMD programs—although not his aspirations. However, at the same time, the sanctions were a failure because they proved self-defeating.

Obviously, the tragic implosion of Iraq during the 1990s was not all the fault of the sanctions. Saddam Husayn bears at least half of the blame, arguably more. He refused to comply with the UN Security Council resolutions and used the sanctions to create suffering among his own people for his personal benefit—stoking international sympathy for their lifting and to punish disloyal elements of the Iraqi populace. Nevertheless, we cannot blame it all on him, either. The sanctions were overly severe and poorly designed. They helped to gut Iraqi society. They probably caused thousands, and possibly tens or even hundreds of thousands, of deaths.
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They undermined Iraq's health and educational systems. They concentrated heretofore unheard-of power in the hands of the central government. They further damaged Iraq's oil, transportation, and communications infrastructures, all of which had been battered by a decade of Saddam's wars. They helped to take what had been one of the most progressive and modern societies of the Arab world and set it back by decades. They turned many Iraqis against the United States even as they also hardened many Iraqi hearts against Saddam.
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Worse still, as the damage that the sanctions (as manipulated by Saddam) were doing to Iraqi society became ever more apparent, they turned international opinion increasingly against the entire effort to contain Saddam Husayn.
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In the late 1990s, I served on the staff of the U.S. National Security Council as the director for Persian Gulf affairs. One of my primary responsibilities was holding together the containment of Iraq. What I saw was that as hard as we fought against it, as hard as we tried to convince the world that the sanctions were not responsible for any of
the death and suffering in Iraq—that there were provisions for Iraq to import food and medicine, that the Iraqis were exaggerating the extent of the problems, and that Saddam was deliberately depriving his own people to
cause
death from starvation and disease—it did not matter. It wasn't that no one believed us; they generally did. It was that they did not care. The people of the world just wanted the suffering of the Iraqi people to end, and if Saddam would not do the right thing then the United States and the UN had to instead. And so, by the end of the 1990s, the support for sanctions on Iraq, indeed for the containment of Iraq, was evaporating. The sanctions were collapsing, and Saddam was able to smuggle and cheat more and more. Less than ten years after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, many countries were simply ignoring the sanctions.
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Consequently, still another lesson from our unfortunate Iraq experience that we ought to have learned but appear to be in danger of repeating is that if we make the sanctions on Iran too harsh, they are likely to become unsustainable. It is why O'Sullivan and other scholars of sanctions warn, “Sanctions should almost never be allowed to cause any form of extreme deprivation.”
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Although the current Iran sanctions do not ban exports of medicine, the impact of lower import revenues and higher inflation is making it harder for Iranians to get access to medical supplies, including lifesaving medicines.
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A comprehensive analysis by the International Crisis Group warned, “Arguably, the most negative consequence (of the sanctions) has been to seriously undercut the healthcare system.” Medicine has become extremely expensive and there are shortages of specialized drugs for cancer patients, hemophiliacs, diabetics, and people with multiple sclerosis and other serious conditions.
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Iran may already be setting in motion an effort to take a page from Saddam's playbook and begin to undermine the sanctions against it by portraying them as having an outsize effect on the wider Iranian populace. In response to new EU sanctions in October 2012, the regime referred to them as “inhuman.”
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It was an incongruous note and perhaps a taste of things to come.