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The sanctions on Iraq (1990-2003) posed an excruciating moral and strategic political dilemma. The sanctions caused immense human suffering, while doing little to unseat Saddam Hussein from power. For some, this reality created an urgent moral imperative to lift the sanctions immediately, at whatever cost. But given the absolute brutality of Saddam's regime, lifting the sanctions - and awarding the tyrant a significant political victory - seemed at best a problematic moral stance. Saddam bore some responsibility for the horrific effects of the sanctions, both in his refusal to comply fully with UN disarmament resolutions and in his cynical manipulation of the flow of humanitarian relief for his own domestic and foreign political ends. The difficult moral decisions were compounded by perplexing strategic concerns. The sanctions succeeded in preventing Iraqi acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, and significantly weakened Iraqi military capabilities, but at the same time actually strengthened Saddam's domestic position, and by the late 1990s had evolved into a potent instrument of Iraqi foreign policy. Because sanctions are often presented as an 'ethical' or 'humane' alternative to war, they carry a particular moral burden which makes them an easy target for accusations of hypocrisy. This paper argues that the distinctively moral tone of the international argument about Iraq explains otherwise puzzling outcomes: the empowering of an otherwise quite weak transnational activist network; the rhetorical entrapment of the United States and the UK into backing the creation of an unprecedented humanitarian relief programme within the sanctions regime ("Oil for Food"); the sudden collapse of compliance with the sanctions in the late 1990s; and ultimately the failure of the United States to win international backing for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The strategic payoffs to moral argument generated great incentives for hypocrisy, which had the unfortunate result of stripping away the very possibility of generating legitimacy not only for the sanctions, but for virtually any policy towards Iraq. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]