Editorial: Libya and sanctions

May 3, 2004
Relaxation by the US of a longstanding ban on trade with Libya should strengthen calls for reassessment of unilateral sanctions. ...

Relaxation by the US of a longstanding ban on trade with Libya should strengthen calls for reassessment of unilateral sanctions.

President George W. Bush on Apr. 26 removed most restrictions on US business with Libya, citing the African country's announcement last Dec. 19 that it no longer seeks nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (see related story, p. 36). Bush also approved reestablishment of a diplomatic mission in Tripoli. The United Nations lifted sanctions last September after Libya accepted responsibility for the 1988 bombing of an airliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, and made payments to victims' families.

Libya began trying to escape pariah status in 1999, when it surrendered two suspects in the Lockerbie bombing for trial in Scotland. One of the suspects eventually was convicted.

Measured response

The US response is pointedly measured. Libya remains on the Department of State's list of countries supporting terrorism. Bush confined his praise to Libya's renunciation of weapons of mass destruction. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi justified the caution with a news conference diatribe in Brussels during which he seemed to warn about a possible reversion to terrorism. What a charmer.

The question of the moment is the extent to which sanctions precipitated this quarter-turn toward international civility. They've been in effect a long time. After declaring Libya a terrorism sponsor at the end of 1979, the US embargoed imports of Libyan oil in 1981 after American warplanes shot down Libyan aircraft that attacked them over the Mediterranean. The US imposed full trade sanctions in 1986, the same year it bombed targets near Tripoli and Benghazi following implication of the Libyan government in a Berlin nightclub bombing in which two US soldiers perished. The UN imposed its sanctions in 1992 in re- sponse to Libya's initial refusal to turn over the Lockerbie suspects.

So a decade of international trade restrictions followed a comparable period of unilateral sanctions characterized by terrorist attacks and military reprisals. The sanctions certainly hurt Libya economically. But they didn't deter terrorism. If anything, they kept Gadhafi from strengthening his military. When the US responded to terrorism militarily in Afghanistan and Iraq, Gadhafi had to wonder whether he'd be next. That worry, not sanctions, probably was decisive in his change.

Sanctions didn't work in Iraq, either. In fact, they seem increasingly to have backfired. While Iraqis suffered, former President Saddam Hussein enriched himself and his cronies by skimming the United Nations Oil-for-Food program. Investigations have begun of possible UN complicity in the corruption. The implications are huge for the utility of international sanctions and for the UN itself.

Nor have sanctions had desired effects in Iran, where revolutionary hard-liners remain in power despite clearly expressed hopes by a majority of Iranians for reform. Supporters of the sanctions see success in the Islamic republic's past economic distress. But the imposed hardship hurts the wrong people. It alienates not only Iranians inclined to favor the US but also traditional allies. Much international animosity now leveled at the US has roots in third-party sanctions enacted with the ill-conceived Iran Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) of 1996. Because the US has chosen not to outrage trading partners by enforcing ILSA's extraterritoriality provisions, American companies have lost business in Iran to competitors while the credibility of US foreign policy has suffered. And, to repeat, hard-liners still rule Iran.

At war as it is against terror, the US should not deny itself the use of any weapon, military or diplomatic. Sanctions must be part of the arsenal. The US, however, has applied them clumsily in the past and should learn from its errors.

Sanctions study

In March, the President's Export Council, a private-public advisory group that meets under auspices of the Department of Commerce, recommended that the Bush administration renew a suspended study of unilateral sanctions. The recommendation deserves action as a matter central not only to national economic interests and foreign relations but also to security.

With costly military operations under way in Iraq and Afghanistan, economic hardship the US imposes on itself through trade sanctions helps terrorists. And a covert enemy can only welcome the stupefaction into which the US tends to settle after it imposes sanctions. To people the US would like to change, sanctions are much less persuasive than the threat of military assault. Ask Gadhafi.