In May 2003, George Lopez found himself on the phone with an angry Judith Miller of The New
York Times. A month earlier, while Lopez was giving an interview on The Newshour with
Jim Lehrer, Miller had been beamed into the show via satellite and proclaimed that the Marines
with whom she was embedded in Iraq had found chemical weapons. (This claim later proved to
be false.)
Lopez, a Notre Dame professor of political science, had been invited on TV to discuss the
apparent absence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq. Drawing on a decade of
research he and colleague David Cortright '68 conducted on both the sanctions and inspections
in Iraq, Lopez argued that even before the war it was clear there weren't any weapons.
When Miller, the now-infamous journalist whose reporting on WMD was subsequently
discredited, called Lopez, she demanded that he admit he had, essentially, gotten lucky with his
prediction. "Admit it was a guess," Lopez recalls her saying. "There's no way you could have
known. There's no way you could have known!"
At one level, it's easy to understand why Miller was so incredulous. After all, the White
House, foreign intelligence agencies and Miller's own newspaper all got the WMD issue wrong.
How did two academics in South Bend get it right?
Membership in the club of foreign policy elites, those wise men and women whose op-eds are published in the Washington Post and then circulated in the State Department and the
U.N. secretary-general's office, generally consists of experts living in the I-95 corridor that
connects Washington, D.C., to Cambridge, Massachusetts. But over the last 15 years, Lopez and
Cortright have been at the center of the defining foreign policy debates of our time: from
sanctions to weapons proliferation, inspections to counterterrorism.
"Their reputation ranges far and wide in the international community," a U.N. official
who's worked closely with the pair told me via email. They are known, she wrote, as
"knowledgeable, focused, articulate and low-key. . . . The U.N. Secretariat routinely provides
their books to Security Council members, including new members each year, as they join the
council."
Lopez is 5-feet-6 and excitable, Cortright, taller and reserved. They know each other's
schedules to the minute and finish each other's sentence. Lopez wears a shirt, tie and no jacket;
Cortright a jacket, shirt and no tie. Though they both pursue independent research in their
respective areas of expertise, their collaboration has been so thorough and so durable, it's easy to
see why Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, once introduced George
Lopez at a panel as "George Cortright."
From their perch at Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies in South
Bend, the pair has shuttled back and forth to U.N. offices in New York and meetings from Bonn
to Baghdad. They've testified before Congress, advised diplomats and co-authored 23 articles
and chapters and six books. "They were the go-to people on economic sanctions," says Gerry
Powers, policy studies director at the Kroc institute since 2004. In his previous job as director of
the Office of International Justice and Peace for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,
Powers routinely consulted with Lopez and Cortright. "They really wrote the book," he says.
Lopez says that sometimes after a meeting with diplomats or government officials, "we'd
come back on the plane and shake our heads and say, 'How crazy is it that two local yokels from
Indiana are at the center of crafting international sanctions strategy?'"
The two "local yokels" come from complimentary backgrounds. Lopez, 56, has been a
student or academic his whole life. He received a doctorate in international relations from
Syracuse University in 1975, with a focus on the ethics of war, just-war theory and human rights.
At 25, he was hired by Earlham College, a small, Quaker school in Richmond, Indiana, where he
ran the school's Peace and Global Studies program. He was hired as one of Kroc's first faculty
members when the institute was officially christened in 1986.
Cortright, 60, is a self-described "Catholic school boy." He wasn't particularly interested
in politics, he says, "until the Army came knocking on my door and I had to think about it." He
used his musical ability to land himself in the Army's band and was stationed stateside. At that
point, a growing phalanx of soldiers were turning against the war in Vietnam. Cortright quickly
became one of them. He organized GIs against the war and spent his off-duty time handing out
anti-war material and organizing educational events. Although Cortright says he made sure to
engage in all of his anti-war activities legally -- off-duty, out of uniform and off-base -- he
eventually ran afoul of the military brass. In a case that eventually reached the U.S. Supreme
Court under the name Cortright v. Resor, Cortright and his fellow activists argued that the Army
was suppressing the soldiers' First Amendment rights by punishing them for their outspoken
views about the war. They lost, but by then Cortright was out of the Army.
After leaving the Army, Cortright received a doctorate in political science from Union
Graduate School in 1975; his dissertation became the book Soldiers in Revolt. He then became
one of the leaders of the nuclear-disarmament movement, directing the group SANE and helping
to organize the march of more than a million people in Central Park in 1982. "When I started we
had maybe 2,000 people on the membership list but very few of them were active. When I left in
1987, there were 150,000 members."
After years of moving in and around the same circles, Cortright and Lopez's paths
crossed in 1987 when Lopez was invited to give a talk at Tufts University's new peace studies
program. After the talk, Cortright approached Lopez and expressed his enthusiasm about the new
Kroc institute at his alma mater. Soon thereafter, Cortright was brought to Kroc as a research
fellow. Additionally, in 1992 he was hired as president of the Fourth Freedom Forum, a small
family foundation in Goshen, Indiana, dedicated to promoting the "force of law" over the "law of
force."
In 1992, Lopez and Cortright were discussing potential areas of scholarship on which to
collaborate. They noticed that in the wake of the Gulf War, not only had the Security Council
passed comprehensive sanctions against Iraq, but it had recently added Yugoslavia and Haiti.
"Oddly, no one had done very much research on economic sanctions," Lopez says. So they set
out to fill the gap.
As a point of collaboration, economic sanctions were nicely at the center of the two men's
respective interests. "David could be true to his role as a president of an organization that was
interested in economic means of building peace," Lopez says, "and I could be true to an agenda
of peace through rule of law and peace through nonviolent means."
The use of economic sanctions was not new. When the U.N. charter was drafted in 1945
it included a provision for the Security Council to implement "complete or partial interruption of
economic relations" in response to "breaches of the peace." For most of the United Nations'
history, Cold-War deadlock meant that gathering sufficient Security Council votes to impose
sanctions was an impossibility, with the notable (and much celebrated) exceptions of
comprehensive sanctions against the white supremacist governments of Rhodesia in 1966 and
South Africa in 1977.
With the Cold-War deadlock broken in 1989, sanctions became an increasingly attractive
option. Motivated by political desire among Security Council members to provide some response
to international bad actors without committing troops or attempting a military response,
sanctions appeared to offer little cost and the promise of some benefit. Although sanctions were
applied routinely in the early 1990s, little work had been done on the policy side to evaluate their
effectiveness.
The Notre Dame scholars decided in 1993 that they should investigate the consequences
of sanctions, and they put together a conference. "I couldn't believe how many people attended
and how every U.N. official we invited was willing to come," Lopez recalls. "We had people
together for two-and-a-half days, and, wow, it just took off."
Lopez and Cortright edited the conference presentations and published them as a book, Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold War World? They then
embarked on a series of case studies that evaluated the now-proliferating sanctions. The
conventional wisdom at the time, as Lopez points out, was that sanctions didn't work. This
conclusion was based largely on a series of studies conducted by the Institute for International
Economics in the 1990s. Grouping together all sanctions imposed by single countries (such as
the U.S. embargo on Cuba), international bodies and the United Nations, all the way back to
1914, the studies found sanctions to be "successful" roughly 35 percent of the time.
The duo saw a deep problem with the study and its underlying quest. Asking whether
"sanctions work" is, in many respects, as useless a question as asking whether war works. The
answer is: it depends. World War II worked, World War I, not so much. As Lopez and Cortright
began to study the implementation and the effects of sanctions, they shifted the discussion away
from "do sanctions work?" toward "under what conditions do sanctions work?" They also
investigated the costs to the countries imposing the sanctions and to the civilian populations in
the countries upon which sanctions were imposed.
So Lopez and Cortright set out modernizing and updating sanctions scholarship,
equipped with an ever-expanding set of data. As they continued to publish studies, the Security
Council continued to hand out sanctions. The need for knowledge and analysis was pronounced.
"Governments like to pretend that they know everything," says Carne Ross, who was the
United Kingdom's Middle-East expert at the United Nations from 1997 to 2002, "but in fact they
are skating across the surface just like everybody else. When you have technically competent
people coming in and giving you advice, you take it quite seriously. That was the value of their
work. It's pretty rare in foreign policy to come across people who have actually done the
research."
Through their access to the community of policy makers, Lopez and Cortright became a
way for the United Nations to talk to itself, at a time when the proverbial left hand and right hand
involved in making policy had no idea what the other was doing. "So within the [U.N.] building
in New York, it's what are they doing at the State Department?" Lopez recalls. "And in the State
Department, it's what are they doing at the U.N.? In the Haiti committee: what are they doing
over at the Yugoslav committee? It's absolutely unbelievable."
For the first few years of their work on sanctions, sanctions policy questions largely flew
under the public radar. Any issues were the concern primarily of the technocrats inside the
United Nations charged with implementing and overseeing sanctions. That would change in the
mid-1990s as the effects of the comprehensive sanctions in Iraq claimed international attention.
In 1995, researchers for the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimated
that 576,000 Iraqi children under age 5 had died as a result of sanctions. (Although that figure
was later called into question, even the most authoritative studies place the number of infant
deaths in the hundreds of thousands.) At that point, Lopez says, "We're hearing from council
members nervousness about Iraqi sanctions: This is too much. This is over the top."
As the humanitarian toll in Iraq became more apparent and the sanctions became
increasingly controversial, Lopez and Cortright found themselves in the middle of a contentious
and passionate debate. Groups such as Voices in the Wilderness began organizing across-the-
globe opposition to the sanctions regime, and diplomats outside the United States and Britain
came to see them as cruel and inhumane. "The French U.N. rep had a poster on his wall,"
Cortright recalls. "It said: Sanctions kill."
Lopez and Cortright took a "mend it, don't end it" approach. Using the framework they'd
established in their scholarship, they argued that both the humanitarian impact and the political
effectiveness of the policy would be improved if the sanctions changed from a punitive model of
containment to a bargaining framework. The stick of sanctions, they said, should be matched
with the carrot of incentives. In recognition of their general theory of international relations, they
even have a bundle of sticks and carrots hanging from the door of one of their offices.
The pair lobbied U.N. officials behind the scenes to alter the Iraqi sanctions to allow
limited oil sales, which would produce revenue that could then be used to purchase humanitarian
goods. In Lopez and Cortight's model, this wouldn't be the end point. Further concessions and
cooperation with weapons inspectors by the Saddam Hussein regime would then lead to loosened
sanctions, ones that would maintain the airtight arms embargo in place but would expand the
civilian goods available and provide some much needed economic stimulus to a desperate
populace. "We thought the Iraqi sanctions could be helpful if they could be humanized," says
Lopez, somewhat forlornly.
The middle-of-the-road position granted them few allies, at least in the public debate.
The Security Council did alter the structure of sanctions to the Oil-for-Food program in 1995,
but the U.S. and British governments, wary of appearing to capitulate to Hussein, acted to make
Oil-for-Food as restrictive and punitive as possible. Sanctions foes came to see Oil-for-Food as a
cruel ruse, a means of slapping a humane label on a policy only marginally less inhumane than
its predecessor. "That's when we get called baby killers," Lopez says. This clearly took a toll on
both men.
"One of the most poignant moments for me," says Lopez, "was sitting in a meeting with
the U.S. Conference of [Catholic] Bishops and there's one of my great heroes, Bishop
Gumbleton, saying, 'These are immoral! Take them off.'" Lopez pounds the table for emphasis.
In the midst of this sanctions impasse, each side dug in. The Iraqi government, faced with
no rewards for continued compliance, stopped complying and began using the deaths of its
citizens as a propaganda tool. The United States and British tightened the reins on "dual-use
goods," everything from medicine to refrigeration equipment that conceivably could have been
used for weapons production.
Despite the fact that the debate was shot through with bad faith and the high-octane
rhetoric of moral indignation, Lopez and Cortright maintained a tremendous degree of respect
from all sides of the argument. "It's hard to say enough about how much George and David have
contributed to the thinking and scholarship and the policies involving economic sanctions," Joy
Gordon, a professor of philosophy at Fairfield University who emerged as one of the leading
critics of the Oil-for-Food program, wrote in an email. "They've provided an important moral
voice in an area -- international relations -- that's often dominated by pragmatic self-interest. . .
. I've rarely seen senior scholars of their caliber who have also shown such a commitment to
collegiality, to exchanging ideas and supporting the work of others in the field."
A Republican staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that had called Lopez to
testify during the Oil-for-Food hearings in 2004 agreed. What distinguished Lopez, the staffer
said, was that he could be counted on to provide a "nonpartisan, objective view" in a highly
politicized proceeding. "The sanctions debate was very polarized," says Carne Ross of the U.K.
mission, "and [Lopez and Cortright] came forward with ideas to try to break the division."
Through the 1990s, Lopez and Cortright continued working to refine the sanctions
methodology. The United Nations contracted them to develop a framework for analyzing the
humanitarian impact of sanctions. The scholars participated in two international reform
initiatives -- one in Germany, the other in Sweden -- that were part of a burgeoning sanctions
reform movement. They advocated what is now termed "smart sanctions," economic penalties
focused tightly on wrongdoers that manage to avoid broad civilian suffering. Their book Smart
Sanctions: Tools of Economic Statecraft was published in 2002, and smart sanctions became a
more attractive option after its relative success in Libya.
Then came the drumbeat for war, and Cortright and Lopez found themselves once again
in a unique position. Through their work on sanctions, they had become experts on the weapons-inspection regime in Iraq. In 2002, they sifted through the evidence and issued a series of policy
briefs arguing against the war. Lopez and Cortright had actually read the U.N. special
commission reports that detailed what weapons and materials had been identified and destroyed.
As they went through the lists they became convinced that few, if any, weapons were left. U.N.
inspectors, they wrote that year, "were remarkably successful in their efforts to disarm Iraq of its
weapons of mass destruction."
Though the consensus view among foreign-policy elites was that Iraq did have some kind
of a weapons program, Lopez and Cortright's work gained them notice in some interesting
circles. In autumn 2002 the pair was invited to a secret meeting with the CIA. The gathering was
a no-paper affair. "No business cards, no pads, no notes, no names," recalls Cortright. The agents
never gave their names but quizzed Cortright and Lopez on their thoughts about weapons
proliferation in both Iraq and elsewhere. "They'd read our stuff," says Lopez. "It was incredible
external validation. That's what gave us a good hunch that we were right on the mark about the
weapons data."
In May 2002, just before the run-up to war gathered steam, Lopez and Cortright
submitted an article to the policy journal Arms Control Today, arguing that sanctions were
working in disarming and containing Hussein. After dithering, the journal eventually published
the piece that September, though only with a matching article from Charles Duelfer, who later
headed up the post-war search for WMD. Duelfer argued that sanctions were falling apart and
Iraq would continue to have banned weapons as long Hussein was in power.
"I think you could say their work was one of the most often-cited works underscoring the
case against the war," says Johanna Mendelson-Forman, who worked with Lopez and Cortright
while at the United Nations Foundation. "Even before the war, people that are now against it
basically bought into the nuclear weapons argument."
Of course, after the fact, Lopez and Cortright's predictions were proved right and their
work vindicated. In 2004, they published a much-cited article in Foreign Affairs titled simply
"Containing Iraq: Sanctions Worked." It made the case that despite hostility toward the policy
from both the left and right, the sanctions had succeeded in dismantling the regime's weapons
programs -- a fact they had argued before the war. As Iraq continues to speed toward disaster,
targeted sanctions have gained in esteem among the international diplomatic community. The
United Nations recently imposed smart sanctions on North Korea, and the United States is
pushing hard for targeted U.N. sanctions on Iran. "We now have more U.N. sanctions in place
against more entities in the globe than ever before," says Lopez.
In addition to their sanctions work, Lopez and Cortright have now turned much of their
attention to counterterrorism. The duo is seeking a cooperative international framework, rooted
in collaboration, the rule of law and U.N. leadership, to solve the problems that Al Qaeda poses.
They've co-written several reports on the subject, and Cortright recently published the book Gandhi and Beyond: Nonviolence for an Age of Terrorism.
The theme that runs through all of their work, from sanctions to nonproliferation to
counterterrorism, is how to make peace work -- not as a an abstract ideal, but as a practical
reality. Father Theodore Hesburgh, CSC, who was responsible for raising the money to open the
Kroc Institute while he was president of Notre Dame, says that this is the pair's greatest
contribution. "It's obvious one of the great challenges today is war and peace," he says. "We
have to come down on the side of peace, and it's not enough to say 'I'm going to be peaceful.'
How do you achieve peace? How do you resolve conflict?"
War seems simple before it is waged and hopelessly complicated as soon as it begins. As
Lopez and Cortright have shown, peace, alas, is the same. While literally armies of experts study
the complexities of war, far rarer are those who devote themselves to studying the technical
complexities of peace.
Chris Hayes is a senior editor of In These Times and an adjunct professor of English at Saint
Augustine College in Chicago.
(February 2007)
