by David R. Henderson
Friday, October 30, 1998

When I was a kid, the boy next door once played a nasty trick on my brother Paul: our neighbor held his cat in his arms, brought it within a few inches of Paul’s face, and pulled its tail. The suddenly angry cat bit Paul’s face. My brother and I were upset; the cat, we thought, should have bitten the perpetrator’s face. I think of that incident whenever I hear people call for economic sanctions against a whole country.
When governments impose sanctions, the officials implementing the policy want to harm the dictator or bad guy heading the other country’s government. That’s the goal. What they do to achieve it is intentionally harm many innocent people in those countries by cutting them off—if the sanctions are effective—from food, medicine, and other goods that they need or value. The sanctions almost always work in a limited sense: they impose some harm on innocent people in the target country. But that’s not the goal. Nor is the goal to cut off the dictator from food, medicine, et cetera. You can be sure that Saddam Hussein and Fidel Castro are not hurting for antibiotics or high-quality food. No. The harm that the advocates of sanctions want to inflict on the bad guys is indirect. They are yanking innocent people’s tails so that those people, like our neighbor’s cat, will lash out at whoever’s face is right in front of them. They want those people to see their own government as the enemy and to try to overthrow it.
But people are smarter than cats. When people suddenly find food, clothing, medicine, and other goods in short supply, when they find themselves a lot poorer and focusing desperately on day-to-day survival, they will take the time to find out who is responsible. And guess what? They do find out. Although governments in embargoed countries like Iran, Iraq, and Cuba strictly control what newspapers, radio, and television report, one piece of information that is sure not to be censored is the role of outside governments in the country’s economic distress.
Of course, those governments will exaggerate the harm done by the sanctions. Although socialism is what’s killing poor people in Cuba, for example, Fidel Castro has, for almost forty years, blamed Cuba’s economic problems on the “blockade,” his word for the embargo imposed by the U.S. government in the early 1960s. But he can plausibly make this claim because the embargo exists. Likewise, although much of the Iraqis’ pain is caused by Saddam Hussein’s diversion of resources to his war machine, the pain caused by economic sanctions is quite real.
What do people in embargoed countries do when they find out that foreign governments threaten their survival? They want to do what the cat wouldn’t do: bite the hand or face of the perpetrator. In fact, I can think of no case in history where as a result of sanctions imposed by government A on people in country B, country B’s people overthrew their own government. It’s the stuff of novels, and not very good novels.
To understand how people in embargoed countries feel, you will have to use your imagination. Picture yourself back in 1974. President Nixon’s popularity has hit bottom. Many Americans want him out, but he holds on. Now imagine that the head of a freer country—say, Switzerland—thinks Nixon is a vicious leader and imposes sanctions on us. Because of these sanctions, we can’t get medicine and we can’t feed our families adequately. We spend our days scraping for the basics we need to survive. (Of course this is implausible in the United States, which is why I said you would have to use your imagination.) Now ask yourself: Is your first thought that you should organize and try to overthrow the president?