Review Sanctioning Saddam, The Politics Of Intervention In Iraq

Graham-Brown, Sarah, Sanctioning Saddam, The Politics Of Intervention In Iraq, London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 1999

 

Sanctioning Saddam, The Politics Of Intervention In Iraq is about the unintended consequences of the Gulf War for Iraq and the international community. Author Sarah Graham-Brown deals with how the conflict created hundreds of thousands of refugee, sanctions led to a humanitarian crisis, and Kurdistan was given autonomy which immediately fell into armed conflict. All those sections are very well written. The one drawback is the discussion about non-governmental organizations and the United Nations’ work in Iraq. It’s just not half as interesting as the rest. Otherwise, Sanctioning Saddam is a good overview and analysis of Iraq and U.S. policy in the 1990s.

 

The best part of the book might be about the creation of an autonomous Kurdistan, which was not expected, and led to a decade of chaos. The major parties the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) held elections for the new regional government in 1992 but it quickly fell apart due to the differences between the two. Baghdad imposed an embargo cutting off oil, electricity, rations and other goods causing shortages on top of the U.N. sanctions which still applied to Kurdistan. When disputes over revenue emerged the parties went to war. Turkey, Iran, the United States and the Iraqi government were all drawn in usually making the situation worse. The KDP for example, invited Saddam to invade the region in 1996 to expel the PUK. Iran then supported the PUK which recaptured almost all of its lost territory. Today Kurdistan likes to promote itself as the stable part of Iraq, but it’s first ten years of existence were anything but. This fits into the author’s thesis that the Gulf War set off all kinds of repercussions. The U.S. and the West never expected an autonomous Kurdistan to emerge but in order to deal with the refugee crisis it created one. They were then drawn into the years long conflict between the KDP and PUK but never came up with an actual strategy for the region, which often complicated matters.

 

The only drawback to Sanctioning Saddam is the last part about the work of NGO’s and the United Nations’ humanitarian groups. Graham-Brown goes over all the difficulties these organizations had working in Iraq with funding, limitations placed upon it by Baghdad and more. She makes a good point that the United Nations was completely overwhelmed by its work in the country from providing assistance to running weapons inspections. The problem is reading about one NGO after another is just not interesting and even gets monotonous after a while.

 

Despite that Sarah Graham-Brown did make a very good analysis of the 1990s. There is a lot of information about the Bush and Clinton administrations struggling to deal with Saddam, the Kurdish conflict, the sanctions and more. She makes a convincing argument that Washington was always reacting to Iraq rather than trying to set the agenda. It didn’t mean to create a Kurdistan but when it did it led to a new conflict which the U.S. was not prepared for. That’s the lasting message of the book. Washington thought it could expel Iraq from Kuwait and then leave but found itself entwined with the country for more than a decade. Ironically, it would repeat this same mistake in 2003.

 

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