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other state actors make it difficult if possible to confront the question of whether
economic sanctions caused policy changes by Saddam Hussein and his government. This
paper takes a slice of that question, and is devoted to examining whether or not there was
a change in the policies and activities of the government of Iraq between the cease-fire
that imposed the sanctions in early 1991 and the beginning of the military invasion of
Iraq in 2003. This study emphasizes political processes in order to understand how the
political dynamic between the United Nations Security Council and Iraq worked between
the Gulf Wars. It asks: Did the government of Iraq come into compliance with United
Natio ns Security Council demands? Was there a consistent pattern related to this
compliance?
These questions are difficult to answer in narrative form; the United Nations
Security Council placed a litany of demands on Iraq and there were exponentially more
events related to these demands within Iraq during the sanctions regime. Reading a
history of the events lets one know that the road between the Gulf Wars was neither
simple nor straight-forward, and it is difficult to tell exactly what the Security Council
wanted, or how Iraq responded. It is clear that the issue of compliance is not here and
may never be a question of “yes” or “no” but instead questions of relativities, partialities,
and complexities. While these ambiguities will be a part of any analysis of the
relationship between Iraq and the United Nations Security Council during the sanctions
regime, there are ways to minimize the confusion and maximize understanding of the
demands and the ways they are answered.
This paper takes advantage of the benefits of a multi- method approach to narrow
and clarify what is necessarily a very complicated issue. As Andy Bennett notes, “there is
Convention