ABSTRACT
The Bush administration took offi ce in January 2001 harbouring a great degree of skepticism regarding the utility of sanctions. Neo-conservatives – many of whom formed the core of the new administration – had been highly critical of the perceived failure of comprehensive sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, frequently citing the ineffi cacy of these measures as part of their broader criticisms of multilateralism in general and the United Nations in particular.1 Even the new Secretary of State Colin Powell – considered a relative moderate within the George W. Bush administration on many if not most foreign policy issues – famously characterized sanctions as a highly dubious and overused instrument of statecraft during his confi rmation hearing in January 2001. In his terms, ‘stop, look and listen before you impose a sanction…count to 10, call me.’2 Instead, the Bush administration was initially to give clear pride of place to the unilateral application of military force as its favoured instrument of statecraft. Consistent with this, the sanctions epidemic of the Clinton period seemed to have been rapidly cured by the end of Bush’s fi rst year in offi ce, with not a single new unilateral US sanction imposed against another state actor during the year 2001.3 As this chapter goes on to demonstrate, however, this sanctions skepticism was to dissipate quite dramatically over the course of the George W. Bush years.
