Lincoln-Douglas Debate Evidence
For the Resolution
Resolved: The use of economic sanctions to achieve U.S. foreign policy goals is moral.
November/December 1999 NFL LD Topic
Editor and Researcher: Craig Linton
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Stephen Zunes, "Are Iraqi Sanctions Immoral?" Foreign Service Journal February 1999. http://www.afsa.org/fsj/Feb99/AreiraquiSanctionsInmoral.html
(no author mentioned) The Economist (US), Nov 6, 1999 v353 i8144 p17, "Unsatisfactory sanctions". (Brief Article), COPYRIGHT 1999 Economist Newspaper Ltd.
SANCTIONS COMPARED TO WAR OR SILENCE
SANCTIONS are the worst of policy instruments, except for the alternatives: all-out war, or doing nothing at all about cruel and aggressive regimes. That argument is the best anyone can make in defence of the ever-widening array of punitive measures applied to the world's pariahs.
ISOLATIONISM IS BAD
Isolation has helped them to stoke paranoia, justify repression and escape responsibility for their peoples' suffering. In Iraq, and to a lesser extent in Serbia, sanctions have ruined the liberal middle class and spawned gangster elites. The poor, meanwhile, cannot think beyond the struggle to keep alive.
"SMART SANCTIONS" IN QUESTION
The UN's oil-for-food programme, designed to ensure that Iraqi oil revenue is spent on humanitarian needs, has that purpose in mind. But its success is, at best, mixed; it seems, for instance, to have failed to prevent a tragic rise in infant mortality. Similar calculations may have prompted the United States to make its shift in the policy about sanctions against Serbia, and to soften its initial objections to a European Union effort designed to provide some Serbian cities with heating oil and thus reduce the risk of people dying from cold.
ROBERT A. SIRICO, National Catholic Reporter, Sept 24, 1999 v35 i41 p27 "Peace and trade, not sanctions, will change Iraq". (US objects to the Pope's proposed visit to Iraq)(Brief Article) COPYRIGHT 1999 National Catholic Reporter.
SANCTIONS NOT EFFECTIVE IN SOUTH AFRICA
Philip I. Levy of Yale University, writing in the American Economic Review (May 1999), has shown that sanctions did not play the decisive role in bringing down apartheid. Sanctions weren't adopted until 1986, and already the regime had been showing signs of serious strain, dating back to at least 1974. That was when a previous economic growth rate of 4.9 percent per year, dating back decades, downshifted to a 1.8 percent that lasted until 1987.
SANCTIONS = NO HUMAN RIGHTS
We've known since Athens' embargo against Megara in 431 B.C. set off the Peloponnesian War that sanctions are no way to conduct international policy. If we want a world where human rights are respected, the path of peace and trade is to be preferred to a path of ongoing belligerence.
(no author mentioned) BULLETIN OF THE ATOMIC SCIENTISTS, Nov. 1993, pp. 41-45. Copyright (c) 1993 by
the Educational Foundation for Nuclear Science.
SANCTIONS NOT ALTERNATIVE TO WAR
The most common criticism of sanctions is that they are ineffective and even counterproductive, and hence not a realistic alternative to war. A senior State Department official recently summed up the argument against sanctions: "You cannot show one government that has changed due to sanctions.... When the government, the elite and the black marketeers are one and the same, the ones that we really want to hurt do well and the common people get hurt."(3) The correlation between economic pressure and changes in political or military behavior is rarely direct, and sanctions often prove the law of unintended consequences. Not only have the elites in Haiti, Iraq, and Serbia been least affected by the sanctions, there is considerable evidence that they have instead been enriched financially and, in some cases, politically. In all three countries (and in many other cases) the elites and criminal elements who can benefit from skyrocketing inflation or who can control the black market have increased their power--economic or otherwise.
3. Stuart Auerbach, "Are Sanctions More Harmful than Helpful?" WASHINGTON POST, March 28, 1993, pp. H1, H4.
SANCTIONS INCREASE POWER OF NATION
In Serbia, sanctions have tended to reinforce the power of the extreme nationalists--those that they were meant to undermine. Many analysts contend that Western sanctions against Yugoslavia are based on the false assumption that economic pressure will convince Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to sue for peace when, in fact, his political life may depend on a continuation of war.(4) And sometimes sanctions isolate or weaken those most likely to provide a democratic alternative to a repressive regime.
4. Peter Maas, "Serbian People, Politicians Scoff at West's Threats to Sanctions," WASHINGTON POST, March 31, 1993, p. A25.
MORE EFFECTIVE=MORE HARM
The principal moral dilemma posed by sanctions is that the more effective they are, the more likely that they will harm those least responsible for the wrongdoing and least able to bring about change: civilians.
CITIZENS NOT IMMUNE
It is generally accepted that the immunity of civilians applies in cases of economic coercion in which the lives of civilians are placed at risk. But in practice, blockades and sieges often result in tremendous suffering and even the death of "enemy" civilians. This suffering is usually justified by arguments that the civilian population is a legitimate target because it either contributes to the war effort or it shares responsibility for the actions of its government. Thus, the reasoning goes, sanctions appropriately encourage the civilian population to remove the government in power.(10) Such reasoning presumes that the population has consented, at least implicitly, to suffer the risks of the embargo and thus cannot enjoy civilian immunity.
10. Clawson, "Sanctions as Punishment, Enforcement, and Prelude to Further Action," pp. 20-21.
SANCTIONED GOVERNMENT IS RESPONSIBLE
Another argument, which is sometimes legitimate, is that the government under sanctions bears responsibility for the suffering of its people. When dictatorial regimes, as in Iraq, use sanctions to penalize potential opponents and to demoralize the general population, they are to blame for the harm they cause.
SOME SANCTIONED CITIZENS FOR SANCTIONS
In some situations citizens welcome sanctions. Many black South Africans welcomed corporate disengagement and, according to many observers, the general population of Haiti favored the imposition of sanctions by the Organization of American States (OAS) to restore democratic rule. Popular acceptance of sanctions against unjust rule, though inevitably a contested judgment, makes imposed suffering morally tolerable.
Leon T. Hadar, an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute and a Washington, D.C.-based journalist who covers international politics and economics with a special interest in East Asia and the Middle East. "U.S. SANCTIONS AGAINST BURMA, A Failure on All Fronts". http://www.cato.org/pubs/trade/tpa-001.html
SANCTIONS DENY BENEFITS OF U.S.
Sanctions have denied Burmese citizens the benefits of increased investment by American multinational companies--investment that brings technoloygy, better working conditions, and Western ideas.
SANCTIONS ARE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE
Present U.S. policy toward Burma is not going to bring meaningful change in the human rights practices of the regime and will probably make the bad situation in Burma even worse. Sanctions strengthen the hand of the ruling authorities by creating a scapegoat for their own internal policy failures and narrowing the opportunity of private individuals in Burma to expand their economic, social, and cultural contacts with the citizens of the West.
SANCTIONS ARE COUNTER-PRODUCTIVE
One of the most powerful arguments against unilateral economic sanctions is that they rarely work. Sanctions are an inherently flawed strategy because the kind of regime likely to become the target of U.S. sanctions--an authoritarian regime in a less developed country such as Burma--is also the least sensitive to unilateral U.S. economic pressure. Indeed, by reducing the influence of U.S. companies in the target country and driving a wedge between the United States and its allies, unilateral sanctions are likely to be counterproductive.
TRADE IS THE SOLUTION, NOT THE PROBLEM
When it comes to advancing political and economic reforms, U.S. companies in Burma are part of the solution, not the problem. "The presence of U.S. companies abroad helps to promote the values we as a nation espouse, including human rights and fair labor standards," noted Ernest Bower, president of the U.S.-ASEAN Council and one of the leading opponents of sanctions.
Aaron Lukas, an analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies. "Stuck in Sanctions: U.S. Needs Way Out of Policy Morass". http://www.freetrade.org/pubs/articles/al-2-9-98.html
SANCTIONS ARE A COSTLY MIDDLE GROUND
If unilateral sanctions fail so often and for so many reasons, why do the makers of foreign policy continue to rely on them? Often they are viewed as a convenient middle ground between diplomatic protest and the use of force. In addition, the true costs of sanctions are often hidden, allowing Congress to practice what one analyst has called "foreign policy on the cheap." In reality, however, unilateral sanctions are anything but cheap; rather, their profligate use entails very real costs both at home and abroad.
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