Find us on Facebook Follow us on Twitter

Opinion

To the Editor:

Poetry & Art

Classified Ads

Back Issues

Blogs

Exercise in futility

Adam LaMascus
The Commuter

Thursday, November 5, 2009

With the realization that Iran has illegal uranium enrichment facilities, a lot of talk has been going around about putting more embargoes on the nation. What is an embargo? My dictionary describes it as: “A prohibition by a government on certain or all trade with a foreign nation.”

As the Office of Foreign Assets Control (a division of the U.S. Department of the Treasury) likes to point out on its Web site, trade embargoes have become one of the major weapons of not-quite-war in the 20th and 21st centuries. World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War all showed that making war in the modern age is an extremely costly, time-consuming and a risky prospect. So what do we do nowadays? Slap an economic embargo on them! According to Time Magazine, we have done so over 100 times since 1918, against more than 75 countries. Did it work? Well, the Institute for International Economics says they did … less than 20 percent of the time. Even the times they did work, it generally wasn’t as successful as they were hoping. Oh, and on average these sanctions cost us at least $15 billion in lost trade revenues.

Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana said, “Putting a sanction on a
country always seems to be an inexpensive way to address the problem. Unfortunately, almost none of these sanctions have brought about change.”

Ironically enough, the first recorded use of a trade embargo was an epic failure as well. In 432 B.C., the Greek city-state of Athens leveled an embargo on merchants from Megara for helping Corinth, a rival city-state of Athens. Rather than solving the problem, it led to the 27-year Peloponnesian War, which in turn led to Athens being defeated by Sparta and losing its fledgling empire. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the idea of embargoes was here to stay.

Some experts are equating economic embargoes to modern siege warfare, which was designed to starve the populace to the point where they forced their leaders to capitulate. Time Magazine cites a report which estimates that during the 1990s, over one million Iraqi civilians starved to death or died from lack of medical care as a result of the economic sanctions we leveled against Iraq. Sanctions that, in the end, did not make the late Saddam Hussein change his behavior at all.

In 2007, the British magazine The Independent wrote: “Sanctions may not do much to the so-called enemy, but they do feel warm to those imposing them.”

We need to just drop the act and stop wasting time and money with all of our ineffective embargoes. Cuba is still fine, so is Iran, and not trading with them isn’t going to change that. All we are doing is losing money (in a time when we need it) and starving civilians to death (which I’m sure helps us look good to the people of the world). Alex Altman, a Time author, sums it up best: “If shaming Iran and expressing outrage is the primary purpose of the exercise, the U.S. could always make Ahmadinejad (the President of Iran) wear a dunce cap.”

Comment

Commenting is closed for this article.