Are Sanctions Working?

French officials hear that many Iraqi factories are closed or working half time; the nation's largest textile plant is said to be operating only eight hours a week. Egyptian laborers returning from Iraq report that bakers are being forced to mix barley with scarce flour to make a tasteless bread. As if to confirm such reports of hardship, Saddam Hussein's government last week decreed the death penalty for hoarders of wheat, barley, rice, flour and maize.

So is the worldwide embargo against Iraq working? Depends partly on what is meant by working, an ill-defined concept. But if State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler is correct in stating that "the aim of these sanctions is to change the behavior of the government of Iraq," the answer is no. The embargo is causing hardship all right, but the deprivation is probably not severe enough to force Iraq to pull out of Kuwait, at least not within any time frame that the Bush Administration could accept.

To begin, some experts are worried that the more extreme reports of shortages may be disinformation circulated by Iraq to make its foes think a military attack is unnecessary, and thus gain time for Saddam to try to disrupt the alliance against him. More important, hardship for civilians does not necessarily indicate any lessening of Iraq's ability to fight; Saddam's dictatorship can and will squeeze the civilian economy as hard as may be necessary to maintain supplies to the armed forces. Case in point: U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said on ABC-TV's This Week with David Brinkley that "tires are in short supply," but nongovernment sources in Washington say only civilians are affected. The Iraqi military has stockpiled all the tires it needs.

French military officials do say the Iraqi army is running out of spare parts for tanks and armored personnel carriers and, in the words of one top officer, "will crumble soon after the first encounters." But Washington specialists do not believe it. Says Anthony Cordesman, a top congressional staff expert on the Middle East, who toured Iraqi military installations in 1989: "It will be a really long time -- I'm talking maybe a year -- before the embargo seriously affects Iraq's military capacity." Determining whether Saddam will pull out of Kuwait by then without fighting is problematic, and probably irrelevant; nobody expects the Bush Administration to wait that long.