September 22, 2004
FIRST FORCE, THEN SANCTIONS (via Danny Postel):
The Greed Factor: Sanctions against rogue regimes would have been abandoned if Dick Cheney had had his way. (David J. Sirota and Jonathan Baskin, 09.15.04, American Prospect)
In 1992, the Republican Party launched a vicious assault against Bill Clinton for traveling overseas and speaking out against his country’s foreign policy during the Vietnam War. It was the beginning of a strategy to demean the national-security credentials of the Democratic Party. Now, twelve years later, Vice President Dick Cheney has updated the tactic, hammering those who question George W. Bush’s prosecution of the war on terror and impugning John Kerry’s commitment to national security. His rhetoric has been so vitriolic, he actually suggested last week that a Kerry presidency would mean "we will get hit again" by terrorists.Beyond blatantly mischaracterizing Democrats’ positions on defense, these shameless attacks serve to distract from the vice president’s own proclivity for undermining American foreign policy. The record shows that over the last decade, Cheney was willing first to do business with countries on the U.S. government’s terror list, then to travel abroad and condemn U.S. counter-terrorism policy when it got in his way. In the process, Cheney proved repeatedly he could be trusted to put Halliburton’s bottom line ahead of his country’s national security.
As Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush, Cheney helped lead a multinational coalition against Iraq and was one of the architects of a post-war economic embargo designed to choke off funds to the country. He insisted the world should “maintain sanctions, at least of some kind,” so Saddam Hussein could not “rebuild the military force he’s used against his neighbors.”
But less than six years later, as a private businessman, Cheney apparently had more important interests than preventing Hussein from rebuilding his army. While he claimed during the 2000 campaign that, as CEO of Halliburton, he had “imposed a ‘firm policy’ against trading with Iraq,” confidential UN records show that, from the first half of 1997 to the summer of 2000, Halliburton held stakes in two firms that sold more than $73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts to Iraq while Cheney was in charge. Halliburton acquired its interest in both firms while Cheney was at the helm, and continued doing business through them until just months before Cheney was named George W. Bush’s running mate.
Perhaps even more troubling, at the same time Cheney was doing business with Iraq, he launched a public broadside against sanctions laws designed to cut off funds to regimes like Iran, which the State Department listed as a state sponsor of terrorism. In 1998, Cheney traveled to Kuala Lumpur to attack his own country's terrorism policies for being too strict. Under the headline, “Former US Defence Secretary Says Iran-Libya Sanctions Act ‘Wrong,’” the Malaysian News Agency reported that Cheney “hit out at his government" and said sanctions on terrorist countries were "ineffective, did not provide the desired results and [were] a bad policy.”
This criticism seems quite fair. Economic conservatives have been far too willing to trade freely with even monstrous regimes on the pretext that it will force them to loosen and reform more effectively than isolation would punish them. Instead by trading we've made ourselves complicitous in their tryannies. The flip side though is that sanctions are so severe that we should use force more frequently than the Left is willing to contemplate. If sanctions should have remained on Saddam in perpetuity, it's certainly the case that he should have been removed long ago so that the people of Iraq weren't forced to suffer while we punished him. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 22, 2004 5:12 PM
Orrin,
Regarding the trade by Halliburton's sub'y with Iraq; as the documents he's used come from "super secret" UN files, (Claudia Rosseti at WSJ would love to have this kind of access), wouldn't you think this was part of the "Oil for Food" debacle run by the UN and therefore was initiated and acquiesed to by Kerry's mother of all validity, the UN?
And, of course, his anti-sanctions position is the same one he's exhibited in his tenure as VP. Perhaps I've missed something in late 20th and early 21st Century history, santions have defeated and/or changed a terrorist supporting regime in what instance?
For all the sanctions against Libya, they didn't change their behavior until we kicked the crap out of Iraq.
Mike
Mike
But Qaddafi's son had realized they were too isolated several years ago and begun the process of coming in from the cold. And Saddam had less weapons than we all thought he would. Syria's already witdrawing from Lebanon after a month of sanctions.
Posted by: oj at September 22, 2004 6:09 PMHow do you get past the sentence stating the Republicans started to demean Democratic national security credentials in 1992? Does 1968 mean nothing to these people?
Posted by: David Cohen at September 22, 2004 6:17 PMSyria's not withdrawing because of the new sanctions. Syria is withdrawing because somebody from the US government gave Assad a large packet of glossy 8x12 color photos. Taken only a few hundred miles to the east.
Posted by: ray at September 22, 2004 7:15 PMRemember George Will's line: "They love commerce more than they loathe communism".
(Regarding dealings with Poland, circa. 1981)
Posted by: ratbert at September 22, 2004 8:46 PMSeems to me this came up before the war and got shot down but I do not remember the details.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at September 22, 2004 11:02 PMIf we had finished the damn job in the first place, we wouldn't be here today.
This is what you get when one is multilateral and multicultural.
Posted by: Sandy P at September 22, 2004 11:10 PMI don't recall sanctions ever working, although blockades can, sometimes.
Following, Orrin's rule about monstrous regimes, we'd have had to subject Franco to regime change sometime around 1944
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 23, 2004 3:48 PMSanctions worked at least in Cuba, S. Africa, Libya and Iraq and appear to be working in Syria.
I know you rooted for the Comintern, but Franco's was the best government on the continent.
Posted by: oj at September 23, 2004 4:25 PMIf you liked Nazis, you liked Franco. I didn't
I can't figure out what you mean about working in Cuba.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 23, 2004 8:32 PMFranco stopped the Nazis, who your French pals had rolled over for.
Look at Cuba today.
Posted by: oj at September 23, 2004 10:20 PMThe British and Russians stopped the Nazis.
Franco was a tyrant and a nationalist, unlike, say, Quisling, who was not nationalist.
Had Britain not saved his bacon, Franco would have made his peace with Hitler and done what Hitler told him.
Franco was a master to playing off both sides, but he was weak, cruel and evil.
I look at Cuba and see a nationalist, totalitarian regime that has not been affected by sanctions, since out of 180 countries in the world, 179 have no problem dealing with Cuba.
Cuba ought to be rich. It isn't, but it wasn't sanctions that caused that
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 24, 2004 3:06 PMHarry:
Some truth, some Stalinist fiction.
Hitler couldn't beat Britain, Russia, the U.S. or Spain, but of the four only Spain mattered. He could have ignored the other three and sealed the Med if he'd been able to get Franco to fold.
Cuba's a backwards joke whose best people all leave. We won.
Posted by: oj at September 24, 2004 3:15 PMBut, as Harry notes, that would have happened without the sanctions.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at September 24, 2004 3:26 PMMichael:
Yes, but we'd have been implicated in his regime, as FDR implicated us in the maintenance of Stalinism.
Posted by: oj at September 24, 2004 3:45 PMHitler DID defeat Spain. It was the Germans, not the Spaniards, who destroyed the Constitutionalists.
Spaniards would not fight for Franco.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at September 25, 2004 3:13 PMHarry:
Did you read that in a Lincoln Brigade flier? It's absurd. Hitler was interested in Spain for just one reason, the Mediterranean and Gibraltar. Franco denied them to him.