The world sat and watched on September 11, 2001, as America was struck with the first act of terror on American soil ever. Many thoughts passed through the minds of their citizens. Most pertained to the deceased and their families. The world sat and watched again a month later when President Bush declared a war on terror. The public acknowledged the need to destroy the terrorists and their infrastructure. Most approved of the bombing of Afghanistan. But did any of America's citizens ever stop to think what September 11 and the war on terror would do to their economy? Do the negative aspects of the US imposing sanctions on terrorist harboring countries overcome the positive aspects?
Before a discussion on the effects of sanctions on America's economy can be entertained, we must first fully understand what a sanction is, and the history of them
A Sanction is defined as a deliberate, government-inspired with drawl, or threat of with drawl, of customary trade or financial relations.
For those who want the definition in English, it's when a country stops it's foreign trade with another country for their own various reasons. Sanctions have been used throughout time for an assortment of rationale (refer to chart on chronology of sanctions). The initial thought behind sanctions was a great one. If a country doesn't abide by our rules, we're going to ruin its economy. Unfortunately most did not achieve the goals they were set out to do. In case studies of sanctions, analysts (yes I hate them as much as you do) found that when sanctions were imposed to impair the military of the country, they almost always fail.
Of course there are many factors that affect the success of an economic sanction. Studies have found that Sanctions work best when:
1. The goal...
Sanctions on the middle east will never work
they are a bad idea because;
1)They are coming to late(America has already sold enough arms to terrorists around the world to kee them going for years, including the guns for the IRA who periodicly bomb my home town of London, so ta for that!)
2) they just affect the ordinary people. you can never directly target the few fanatics they set out for ,besides,America greatly misunderstands where terrorism comes from-our mistreatment of the middle east for the last one hundred years. If you put sanctions on countrys, like the medicine sanction you put on iraq, it just gets passed on to the peopl, who have to suffer and die,leaving a whole generation of people who are seriously peeved with the us and prone to terrorism-because you must always remeber that one mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter.The US also agravated the people of iraq+afganistan when they "knocked out the terrorists infrastructure" obviously, infrastructure belongs to the people, so when during the gulf war, we started bombing the sewage works and water reserves, it was the people in general who suffered the massive typhiod and cholera outbreaks.Rather nastily, these outbreaks co-incided with the first of the US medical sanctions, leaving the people to die nasty, unesscessay deaths.
Anyway, thats my argument. Good essay!
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