WAR BY OTHER MEANS

...For all of these reasons, the criterion for sanctions cannot be reduced to the one of effectiveness...

...Sanctions that pressure a nation's elite who influence policy are to be preferred to undermining the well-being of the average citizen...

...Perhaps human-rights groups, medical-emergency teams from neutral countries, the International Red Cross, Red Crescent, and similar organizations can be asked to provide on-site investigations to assess the consequences of the sanctions...

...Economic sanctions are essentially efforts to influence a country's behavior by imposing economic penalties...

...Sanctions can prove to be counterproductive...

...The more ruthless and authoritarian the rulers in the targeted country, the more time will be needed for sanctions to have an impact on the elite...

...The targeting na-tion or group of nations has an obligation to consider such consequences before applying sanctions...

...Furthermore, unless the goals of the sanctions are clear, it may be difficult for the target-ed nation to know what it must do to modify or remove them, or for the sanctioning nation to ascertain that the conditions have been met...

...Clear goals also help to avoid the charge of ineffectiveness at home by those with unrealistic expectations of what sanctions can accomplish...

...What responsibility, if any, do they share with the leaders of their government...

...7. Arguments for sanctions should be persuasive enough so that support for the policy is widespread, even if the actual imposition of the sanctions is carried out unilaterally or by only a few governments...

...Undoubtedly this is the U.S...

...Somalia, Haiti, and Bosnia, each in its own way, illustrates the general uneasiness most U.S...

...anticipated rather than actual damage to an econ-omy can mobilize domestic critics to pressure a government to meet the sanction conditions...

...To accomplish this, each situation requires discernment...

...With regard to Cuba, the U.S...

...When the embattled Carter administration imposed economic sanctions against the So-viet Union following the invasion of Afghanistan, it claimed that the sanctions would induce Soviet withdrawal...

...In addition, use of armed force only as a last resort is a longstanding element of the just-war tradition...

...What the pope points out, however, is that even sanctions require justification and should not be used as a blunt in-strument in resolving international tensions...

...They can take a variety of forms: imposing embargoes, barring fi-nancial transactions, freezing economic assets held abroad, and curtailing trade and foreign aid...

...As a practical instrument for the conduct of internation-al relations, sanctions have to be used selectively...

...But the legitimacy of sanctions cannot be reduced to this dimension alone, for sanctions implicitly express commitment to cer-tain norms of international conduct, human rights, and nonaggression...

...In any event, humanitarian concern requires that basic foodstuffs and medicines not be denied the general population...

...Compared to just-war criteria, however, economic sanctions have received lit-tle attention from moral analysts...

...the sense of political iso-lation is then more sharply felt by the targeted nation, which increases the effectiveness of the economic pressure...

...For example, in re-sponse to domestic pressures, leaders of the nation(s) im-posing sanctions may overstate the goals of the sanctions in order to create an image that they are taking decisive action...

...In extreme situations of governmental oppression and control where it is difficult to know what the general population thinks about sanctions, great care must be taken in designing them...

...Sanctions do not pose the same dangers of escalation or irreversible miscalcula-tion...

...The Vatican is suggesting that sanctions ought not to be thought of as easy remedies for complex international sit-uations...

...economic policies toward Cuba over three decades...

...The pope's remarks remind us that sanctions are subject to moral criteria, and that discernment is needed to apply them appropriately...

...Sanctions reinforce such norms by symbol-ically "punishing" those who violate them...

...But these inflated expectations can lead to the conclusion that sanctions in general are ineffective...

...Still, despite their harmful consequences, sanctions are almost always less damaging for noncombatants and the environment than modern warfare...

...For policy makers as well as military planners and moralists there is an analogue here with the requirement to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants in war...

...This is the concern raised by the pope...

...This is the argument of those who want to ban trade with China because Chinese goods for export are produced under inhuman conditions...

...As John Paul said in his address, sanctions are "an act of force," and current experience demonstrates that a poli-cy of sanctions "inflicts grave hardships upon the people of the countries at which it is aimed...

...5. A monitoring system to assess the effect of the sanctions should be instituted...

...How then do we judge the use of sanctions in the case of Iraq, Cuba, or Serbia...

...Vatican spokesman Joaquin Navarro-Valls said after the Aziz visit that sanctions "must always be accompanied by dialogue...

...From the Vatican's perspective, the UN-Iraq dialogue following UN sanctions on Iraq has not been adequate...

...Particularly if the sanctions are imposed for human-rights violations, damage to the economic life and structures of a targeted nation must be considered carefully, for they could prove more harmful in the long run than the conditions that precipitated impo-sition of the sanctions...

...Discrimination is needed in targeting...

...6. In those cases where sanctions are imposed for humanitarian or human-rights purposes, as in South Africa, there should be support for the sanction policy among those who are the victims of a regime's injustice...

...Pope John Paul II, for example, raised questions about the use of economic sanctions in an annual address to the diplo-matic corps (Origins, January 19,1995...

...In the case of Serbia, it appears that sanctions were the re-sponse of NATO nations that wanted to do something but were undecided about a more forceful policy or lacked the collective resolve to act more boldly...

...WAR BY OTHER MEANS Criteria for the use of economic sanctions Kenneth R. Himes The end of the cold war has presented American foreign policy with a paradoxical situation: As the remaining superpower, the United States can consider military intervention without great risk, yet in the absence of a clear threat to the nation most Americans are increasingly unwilling to support military in-tervention...

...Some of the Vatican's displeasure with the sanctions against Iraq has to do with policy shifts by the sanctioners...

...Thus, in some cases, sanctions may be imposed primarily to avoid complicity in an evil situation...

...Sanctions authorized by the United Nations or regional groups such as the Organization of American States should be the norm...

...I would like to propose seven...

...Taken together, these considerations underscore the need to consider sanctions as an alternative to armed force...

...Perhaps our answer will help better define our chance of designing and maintaining effective and moral-ly tolerable sanctions...

...These kinds of goals for sanctions are not easily measured by the single criterion of effectiveness...

...Is a particular conflict sufficiently deadly and intractable to justify targeting an entire people...

...Especially in these cases-selective, not comprehensive-sanctions, aimed at the ruling elite, are to be preferred...

...2. Less harmful ways of resolving the problem ought to be employed first, and the imposition of sanctions should not be seen as the end of diplomatic negotiations but as leverage in the negotiating process...

...Sanctions take time...

...For sanctions to be effective it is partic-ularly critical that neighboring nation-states support them and that countries that share a common culture with the tar-geted nation join in the embargo...

...Though Cuba may not be an exemplar of civil and political liberty, it is not an aggressor nation, nor is its human-rights record signifi-cantly worse than that of many other nations...

...Consider this telling analogy of Lori Fisler Damrosch, professor of international law at Columbia University: We arrest and incarcerate criminals...

...The history and experience summed up in the GAO re-port make it clear that developing criteria for imposing sanctions is a moral and geopolitical necessity...

...Sanctions are then seen as one more instance of bullying behavior...

...Where an international organization like the UN can authorize an armed intervention in the manner of a domestic police force, quickly and effectively restoring order and apprehending the criminal element with little loss of life, there is an argu-ment for choosing armed force over sanctions...

...Debate about the continued use of sanctions by the United States against Cuba centers on this issue...

...Imposing harsh and comprehensive sanctions from the outset can be a mis-take since part of the force of sanctions is the threat of more to come...

...3. The goal of the sanctions should be clearly stated so that the targeted government and the sanctioners both know what must be done to have the sanctions lifted...

...Thus a basic moral question is whether the sanctions will impose greater hardship than the conditions they seek to remedy...

...From the pope's perspective, sanctions are "a means of exerting pressure on governments which have vi-olated the international code of good conduct and of caus-ing them to reconsider their choices...

...Without real effort at a political solution, sanctions become not an instrument of diplomacy but a means of war by attrition...

...Although the case would be unusual, it is possible that a UN-au-thorized, multilateral, armed intervention might be less damaging to a country than a program of sanctions that crip-ples a nation's economy and causes greater or long-term hard-ship to innocent civilians...

...They can be overused or ineffectively put forward as a way to resolve crises that are beyond the scope of what economic pressures can achieve...

...During the 1980s, arguments for sanctions against Libya did not presume that they would end Colonel Khadaffi's support of terrorism...

...Private groups may be better situated to provide this oversight than disputing governments...

...Multilateral sanctions generally have more legitimacy and effectiveness than those unilaterally imposed...

...The pope does not doubt their legality or morality and feels sanctions can be a useful tool in the conduct of foreign policy in principle...

...In both these sit-uations, skillful political leaders can exploit the burdens im-posed by sanctions to rally a people, particularly if there is a prior history of injustice or bad relations between the tar-get nation and the imposing nation...

...Their effects generally have to "trick-le up...

...If none, then must not sanctions be selective so as to minimize harm to innocent segments of a target na-tion...

...When the sanctions fall harshly on the general pop-ulace, a "victim" culture can dig in to resist the sanctions rather than put pressure on the political leaders for change...

...For some, the temptation will be to see effectiveness as the only guideline, which means asking fairly narrow questions: Will sanctions be capably enforced, and will there be sufficient cooperation among the sanctioning states to ensure adequate com-pliance...

...They are rooted in the moral criteria associated with the just-war theory...

...Finally, the side-effects of sanctions can be seriously detri-mental to the long-term economy of the targeted nation, lead-ing to the destruction of resources, the flight of capital, the erosion of working families, the loss of small businesses, and the rise of a black market and corruption...

...What criteria then would help assess the moral le-gitimacy of imposing economic sanctions...

...From the Vatican's perspective, sanctions often punish innocent people and therefore ought to be used spar-ingly and only as a temporary measure...

...They are ordinarily incremental and capable of being altered...

...Indeed, after a March 1995 meeting with Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican secretary of state, said that sanctions "must not be used as a means of war or to punish a population...

...Thus, a 1992 General Accounting Office study done for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee examin-ing the goals, process, and impact of economic sanctions found that, while sanctions can serve a variety of purposes, too lit-tle thought is given to specific goals and the means of accomplishing them ("Economic Sanctions: Effectiveness as Tools for Foreign Policy," GAO Document Distribution Cen-ter, NSIAD-92-106...

...As in South Africa and Haiti, sanctions work better if there is a substantial domestic opposition to the government and if there are powerful classes or groups involved in international business who will feel the impact quickly...

...Certainly this is part of the dynamic at work in Iraq...

...John Paul II has cautioned that, before imposing sanctions, "it is always imperative to foresee the humanitarian consequences...

...Second, when a culture gives great weight to "saving face," the populace can become firmly united in opposition to the sanctioner rather than its own government...

...That is, within the targeted nation there ought to be substantial support for sanctions in order to determine whether the remedy is creating greater hardship than the original injustice...

...There should be a serious political strategy accompanying sanctions, not just an open invitation to talk...

...The sanctioners' statements have not always expressed their true aim, which is to depose Saddam Hussein...

...what is appropriate in one case-an oil embargo-may not be so in another case...

...citizens feel about sending troops abroad...

...stance seems less persuasive, since sanctions are not so much an alternative to military force as an ineffective means of punishing Castro while causing considerable hardship to the people of Cuba...

...President Jimmy Carter wanted to appear bold in his public response, but no one in the administration seriously believed sanctions could end Soviet military action...

...Arms embargoes and seizure of foreign assets ought to be employed before imposing general or comprehensive trade embargoes...

...Add to this sense of caution the desire of many people to support alternatives to armed conflict, among which is economic sanctions...

...Sanctions, therefore, should be calibrated...

...Rather, the sanctions were seen as an expression of revul-sion...

...Sanctions can also have deterrent value since, even if they do not reverse the situation that occasioned them, their im-position may persuade other countries from joining in wrongful behavior or dissuade the wrongdoer from further harmful actions...

...The poor and the powerless, rather than leaders and decision makers, usually feel the impact first...

...4. Sanctions should be selective and aimed primarily at those responsible for the crisis...

...And if there is compliance, will the impact on the target nation be sufficient to achieve the goal desired by those imposing the sanction...

...The ethical component is an additional but essential fac-tor in the debate over sanctions...

...The GAO findings indicate that some goals are achievable (reaffirming international norms by punishment of violators or deterring potential violations by the threat of subsequent penalties), while others are not (bending the target nation's policies to suit the sanctioner's wishes...

...He said that the em-bargo "is an instrument which needs to be used with great discernment, and it must be subjected to strict legal and eth-ical criteria...

...Effectiveness is certainly an important criterion...

...Sanctions of one or other of these types have been imposed over the last several years on Cuba, Iraq, Serbia, Somalia, Libya, Haiti, and Cambodia, with mixed results, politically and morally...

...First, a nation whose citizenry sees itself as cul-turally threatened may interpret sanctions as fur-ther evidence of malicious international forces at work...

...response to the Vatican on how best to deal with a regime like Iraq which refused to accept the conditions imposed upon it by the UN at the end of the Gulf War...

...we do not surround their homes and starve their families, especially if we know the family will starve first...

...1. Because sanctions can impose hardship and great suf-fering on innocent people, they ought not be employed without good reason, viz., clear and systematic acts of ag-gression or repression on the part of the offending nation...

...Consider the lack of influence of U.S...

...Sanctions may be effective, but at what price to a population...