SEGURIDAD

Sanctions, Spies and Shuttered Societies

By Ronald Bruce St John

Global Beat Syndicate April 19, 2004

(KRT)

DUNLAP, Ill.—When it comes to Iraq, most Americans agree our intelligence on unconventional weapons could have been better. The Bush administration went to war because Saddam Hussein stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. But no such weapons have yet been found.

The reverse was true with Libya. While we exaggerated the threat in Iraq, we underestimated the danger in Libya. The Gadhafi regime proved to be much further along in acquiring unconventional weapons than anyone realized.

In both countries, the U.S. government has too often been its own worst enemy. By implementing tough commercial and diplomatic sanctions, we tightly shuttered already closed societies.

In the Iraqi case, we went one step further, discrediting UN efforts to scour the country for unconventional weapons. U.S. intelligence agencies now freely admit we lacked spies in Iraq, what the intelligence community calls “humint” or human intelligence sources on the ground. Yet, the Bush administration worked overtime to deride the efforts of UN inspectors, the best Iraqi “humint” the world had at the time.

The Libya case is instructive here. In the mid-1970s, a few years after Moammar Gadhafi seized power, only a handful of English-language books on Libya were in print. That number had swelled to well over 100 by 1986 when the Reagan administration applied sanctions on Libya. The flood of Libyan students to U.S. schools and universities, which numbered in the thousands in the 1970s and early 1980s, also dried up after 1986.

Executive Order 12543, signed by Reagan on January 7, 1986, prohibited “transactions by U.S. persons relating to transportation to or from Libya” as well as “any transaction by a U.S. person relating to travel by U.S. citizens or permanent resident aliens to Libya.” The Office of Foreign Assets Control termed the prohibition a “travel restriction” as opposed to a travel ban. This author’s personal experience proved it amounted to the same thing.

In consequence, American field research on the Libyan political economy was squelched. A mere handful of books were published on Libya in the last decade. And almost none of them reflected firsthand knowledge of the country. The flow of students and professors to and from Libya also stopped.

Executive Order 12543, and related sanctions, returned Americans and our policymakers to a state of ignorance about Libya. Our miscalculation of Libyan unconventional weapons programs is only the most recent—and perhaps most serious—example of the depths our ignorance reached.

The Bush administration was in a state of ignorance similar to our knowledge of current affairs in Libya when it invaded Iraq. The sanctions regime in place hamstrung efforts to understand what was happening—and, importantly, not happening—inside the country. The consequences of inadequate intelligence have been disastrous, both for the Iraqi people and the coalition forces working to restore order.

The 1996 Iran-Libya Sanctions Act tightened the noose on Libya, adding Iran to the mix. And now we have the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 imposing sanctions on Damascus.

Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria are on the State Department’s list of state sponsors of international terrorism. No state has been removed from that list since its creation in 1979. Instead, the Bush administration added a refinement in 2002 with its designation of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” If dogged pursuit of a policy for 25 years, with little evidence of success, does not highlight a need for reform, then the term “failed policy” has no meaning.

Recent experience, from Iraq to Libya to Iran—plus any number of carefully researched academic analyses of such sanctions—suggests that sanctions seldom provoke the policy change desired by the United States. Shutters tightly drawn have also proved hard to reopen, making it difficult to understand and influence events in closed societies.

Leaving aside other issues, employing sanctions against Syria may be politically popular to some in an election year. But they make it far more difficult to gain vital intelligence needed in a war against terrorism. We should instead engage countries like Syria on all levels with academics, students, tourists—and U.S. officials. A policy of openness and inclusion, focused on dialogue and change, not isolation and recalcitrance, will prove fare more effective in achieving policy change with the countries on the terrorism watch list.

Ronald Bruce St John

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ABOUT THE WRITER

Ronald Bruce St John, an analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus, has published widely on Middle Eastern issues. His latest book on the region is “Libya and the United States: Two Centuries of Strife” (Penn Press, 2002)