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Introduction
United Nations Security Council economic sanctions on Iraq were a salient
political issue internationally in the decade following the First Gulf War. At times, there
was substantial conflict member- nations of the Security Council about the sanctions
regime, and at other times most member-states agreed with the sanctions regime (Bennis
2000; Hollis 2000; Graham-Brown 1999). The sanctions regime on Iraq was
implemented in the wake of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990 (Security
Council Resolution 660), and altered in the cease- fire of the Gulf War in April of 1991
(Security Counc il Resolution 687). In the 1990s, David Cortright and George Lopez’s
“Sanctions Decade” came and went, and Iraq remained under one of history’s longest and
most strict economic sanctions regimes for almost 13 years (Cortright and Lopez 2000;
Selden 1999). Many questions about this sanctions ‘episode’ remain unanswered in the
academic literature; some of those questions provide both insight into the current
situation in Iraq and into the substance of IR theory. Specifically, a number of issues
related to Iraq’s compliance with United Nations Security Council demands become
increasingly relevant as international attention continues to center on what happened in
Iraq leading up to the Second Gulf War and what will become of the nation in the future.
It is those dual purposes which inspire this retrospective analysis. Did Iraq comply with
United Nations Security Council demands? In other words, given United Nations
Security Council demands, and Iraqi response, should economic sanctions have been
lifted? If not, how far from compliance was Iraq? Was Iraq truly a threat to international
peace and security?
Convention