wfn.org | Ethical Dilemmas of Iraq Sanctions Plague Religious Leaders

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10-December-1997 
97462 
 
    Ethical Dilemmas of Iraq Sanctions 
    Plague Religious Leaders 
 
    by Alexa Smith 
 
LOUISVILLE, Ky.--Doubtful about the diplomatic or political effect of 
economic sanctions against Iraq, U.S. church leaders are not quite sure 
what to say or do next in what has become a foreign policy debate with 
staggering humanitarian consequences. 
 
    Though the Middle East Council of Churches (MECC) is increasingly 
explicit in its calls to rescind sanctions for humanitarian reasons, its 
U.S. partners -- who backed sanctions in 1990 in hopes of avoiding the Gulf 
War -- are not.  Uneasy with the humanitarian impact of prolonged use of 
sanctions and with the seemingly shifting rationale for keeping sanctions 
in place, U.S. church leaders are looking for a responsible way out of what 
is perhaps the world's oldest moral dilemma: How much innocent suffering is 
too much, even in pursuit of an ostensibly greater good? 
 
    While the sanctions were imposed by the United Nations Security Council 
in 1991 to stop Iraq's buildup of biological and chemical weapons, several 
U.N. agencies and independent researchers estimate that the sanctions have 
brought about malnutrition and disease that have killed, by even the most 
conservative estimates, more than 500,000 Iraqis.  The U.N. Food and 
Agricultural Organization (FAO) says there are more than one million Iraqi 
dead,  at least 600,000 of them children.  FAO excoriates the Security 
Council for those deaths and regularly appeals to the Council to lift the 
sanctions that it calls "genocidal" in a 1996 letter. 
 
    "Having condemned weapons of mass destruction, having condemned 
aggression  ... what do you do?" asked David Weaver, the National Council 
of Churches (NCC)'s Middle East liaison in New York City.  The NCC's 
churches are  increasingly uncomfortable with the toll extended use of 
sanctions has taken on Iraqi civilians, he said, and the dilemma is 
prodding the organization to undertake an overall study of the ethical use 
of  sanctions. 
 
    "This is a quandary," said Weaver.  "No one's denying that.  Among the 
churches themselves, some would say that the sanctions need to be removed 
immediately.  But as a membership body of 34 churches, we've not yet 
reached the point where we're ready to do that." 
 
    And virtually no church has reached that point. 
 
    The Vatican, for instance, has strongly condemned the suffering 
sanctions have wrought in Iraq, but has not explicitly demanded that they 
be lifted.  About as far as Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP) -- a 
coalition of U.S. Protestants and Catholics that includes the Presbyterian 
Church (U.S.A.) -- is willing to go is to indict both Iraq's "dictatorial 
leader" and "the sanctions strategy of the U.N. Security Council."  CMEP 
also asks that Iraq's sanctions-restricted petroleum sales be increased to 
allow import of "enough food, medicine and repair parts to restore and 
protect the well- being of ordinary people." 
 
    The U.N. secretary general is also recommending that the Security 
Council consider increasing the amount of oil Iraq may sell to buy  food 
and medicine, though no specific export figure was proposed at press time. 
 
    Among the mainline denominations, the PC(USA) may  be the only church 
that has explicitly called for the U.N. Security Council to "consider 
lifting" the embargo on all but military- related goods . That General 
Assembly resolution was followed by a 1997 human rights report that called 
for  "continued easing" of sanctions that does not support Iraq's ability 
to invade its neighbors.  The report advocates allowing entry of goods to 
repair war-damaged utilities, such as electrical, water and sanitation 
plants, and food to a population living in a perpetual state of near 
starvation. 
 
    "It's a complicated issue for the church," said the Rev. Walter Owensby 
of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Washington Office.  "We are anti the 
human impact of sanctions in the case of Iraq.  We don't have a single 
position on the concept of economic sanctions. ... The General Assembly 
handles specific instances of sanctions differently, on a case-by-case 
basis. 
 
    "And it is particularly concerned about the human impact of sanctions 
as they are imposed." 
 
    The use of economic sanctions as a foreign policy tool has a checkered 
record in terms of endorsement by U.S. churches.  In some cases, sanctions 
have been understood as peaceful pressure. There was virtual unanimity 
among churches to impose sanctions against South Africa to force Afrikaners 
to choose between apartheid or economic isolation.  But in other cases, as 
with Cuba, the policies of mainline denominations, including the PC(USA), 
reject sanctions as a weapon in what amounts to an undeclared war. 
 
    The revised 1996 agreement allows Iraq to sell $2 billion worth of oil 
every six months.  But much of the profit goes toward restitution to Kuwait 
for the 1990 invasion and for monitoring the Iraqi military.  Remaining oil 
income can be used to buy food and medicine, which are exempted from 
sanctions, but transport of these goods is often stalled in what many 
describe as a cumbersome oversight process.  What is transportable is too 
expensive to buy in an economy with skyrocketing inflation. For instance, 
the price of wheat flour went up 11,667 times between 1989 and 1995 in 
Iraq, according to the United Nations International Children's Fund 
(UNICEF). 
 
    Though the Security Council imposed sanctions to prohibit Iraq's 
buildup of weapons, U.S. government officials -- who are undoubtably the 
force behind strict enforcement of sanctions, since China, France and the 
Russian Federation have all proposed modifications -- have said that the 
ultimate goal is the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's government.  That is a 
goal different from the one church leaders initially backed and one that 
has been to date unachievable, despite intense international pressure. 
 
    And the ethical issue has become whether the hardship inflicted by 
sanctions outweighs the potential, if somewhat unclear, gain. 
 
    For the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), that's not a 
hard call, according to Sam Husseini, the ADC spokesperson in Washington, 
D.C.  The ADC delivered a petition with more than 7,000 signatures -- about 
20 percent of them church groups -- calling for a lifting of humanitarian 
sanctions on Iraq to President Bill Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine 
Albright and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan late last month. 
 
    "Keep the arms embargo on, but lift the humanitarian aspect of things," 
said Husseini, who says his organization blames both the Iraqi government 
and the U.S.-driven Security Council for the indiscriminate pain.  "The 
suffering is tremendous. ... UNICEF says that one child is dying every 10 
minutes. ... 
 
    "We weren't killing thousands of children every month [in South 
Africa].  We did not bomb South Africa back to a pre-industrial age and 
then put sanctions into place," he said, adding that even chemicals for 
water purification, such as chlorine, are barred because they may also be 
used to make chemical weapons. 
 
    "The sanctions," Husseini said, "have become a weapon." 
 
    In its "Memorandum and Recommendations on the Applications of 
Sanctions," the World Council of Churches (WCC) lays out moral guidelines 
for the use of sanctions.  Among the WCC's guidelines: Sanctions must have 
a clear and limited purpose and no punitive purpose beyond compliance; the 
good that is achieved ... "must not be exceeded by the harm that can 
reasonably be anticipated," and care should be taken to design measures to 
limit suffering of people affected by sanctions who are powerless to change 
their country's policies.  Open access to humanitarian bodies, such as 
churches, to minister to those suffering under sanctions is also 
recommended. 
 
    Churches here -- working without agreed-upon ecumenical guidelines -- 
are groping for the middle ground that minimizes the pain of the innocent 
but takes seriously the risk of further military buildup in Iraq. 
"Sanctions," said the Rev. Robert Smiley of the PC(USA)'s United Nations 
Office in New York City, "can be an act of war.  As soon as you try to 
apply a just-war doctrine [that gains must be greater than losses], you 
have to look at sanctions under the same criteria.  Is the cause just?  Is 
it likely to bring about the desired change? 
 
    "It is a moral dilemma -- whether what we do is helping or hurting.  A 
rigid sanctions policy simply hurts people ... and we wind up becoming 
[punitive] in the process." 
 
     But Alan F. Wisdom, a Presbyterian and senior researcher for the 
conservative Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C., said 
reining in Iraq's capacity to develop nuclear and biological weapons, which 
could cause the deaths of millions, is a necessary objective -- or, to use 
just-war jargon, a greater good.  Though more targeted sanctions are 
morally defensible in this case, Wisdom said, all compulsory pressure  -- 
unfortunately -- works imperfectly and causes  "damage to those [you're] 
trying to affect and also to innocents." For example, withholding 
technology to deter the Iraqi military has the undesirable consequence of 
depriving Iraqi college students of beneficial technologies. 
 
    "Denying [Iraq] the industrial capacity to re-arm is a legitimate 
objective ... and there's some reason to believe it can be achieved," he 
said, adding that sanctions can perhaps slow down that process, as it 
apparently did in the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. If re-arming still 
occurs, he said, military force may be the most morally defensible 
response, since it may cause fewer civilian casualties. 
 
    Military action, however, is the response most church leaders have been 
reluctant to sanction. 
 
    What church leaders do agree on is that churches ought to offer moral 
teaching about the ethical use of sanctions in this policy debate.  But 
explicit moral teaching, ironically, is precisely what church leaders have 
been unable to offer. 
 
    Critics of U.S. threats to hold such comprehensive sanctions in place 
until the Hussein government collapses say there's no incentive for Iraq to 
relent before such a merciless stance.  Many insist that the Iraqi 
government's culpability is grossly underestimated by blaming such terrible 
suffering upon the impact of sanctions alone.  Iraq was already devasted by 
two wars, and the government makes little attempt to use available 
resources to relieve the wider population's suffering from extreme 
shortages of food, depleted health services and illnesses caused by 
unsanitary sewage and water treatment. 
 
    "Sanctions contributed no doubt [to the suffering]," said one UNICEF 
spokesperson, "but they are not the sole cause." 
 
     "A lot of people around here," said Husseini of ADC, "did not have to 
wait on George Bush to tell us that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy.  We just 
have a different perception of the culpability Saddam Hussein has and the 
culpability that the U.S. has. 
 
    "Our membership is pretty disgusted with both." 
 
    The situation is compounded by the Arab states' mistrust of what they 
consider to be the U.S.'s hypocritically shifting alliances --  backing the 
Hussein government when it fought Iran and then waging the Gulf War against 
its former ally.  Nor is this debate separable from Arab animosity about 
what they see as the U.S.'s selective enforcement of U.N. resolutions, 
since there's been little U.S. pressure to force Israel out of Palestinian 
territory it now occupies in defiance of the U.N. or out of the buffer zone 
Israel established inside Lebanon's volatile border.  There is also a 
Turkish military presence in north Cyprus. 
 
    The MECC is becoming more explicit in its call to lift sanctions 
because, it says, ordinary Iraqis are unable to change their government's 
policies or effect its compliance with international military restrictions. 
It has also questioned the propriety of international restrictions on 
Iraq's military capacity. 
 
    In the U.S., the NCC condemned Iraq's aggression against Kuwait and 
pushed for sanctions and diplomacy to resolve the crisis that became the 
1990 Gulf War -- so the NCC is getting what it didn't want: a war and then 
indefinite imposition of economic sanctions.  Just last week, it urged the 
U.N. and other involved governments to resolve the crisis about weapons 
inspections without the use of force and by respecting international law. 
 
    "We've been willing to speak to present crises," said Weaver, 
describing the NCC's dilemma about developing an ethical statement about 
sanctions overall.  "But the larger question of sanctions themselves is a 
difficult question to deal with.  Periodically, the issue is raised ... but 
[in ecumenical circles discussing Iraq] there is more deploring of the 
consequences of the sanctions ... than demanding their removal." 

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