5 countries with the longest ongoing US sanctions

3. Iraq: Sanctions and Saddam's overthrow

Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, annexing it as a new province of Iraq before the US drove out Iraqi forces.

In the aftermath of that conflict, the UN Security Council required the regime to surrender its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and submit to UN inspections. Judging the regime to be defiant on these points, the UN Security Council imposed a series of economic sanctions. 

In response to the invasion of Kuwait, the United States imposed comprehensive sanctions on Iraq as well, freezing the government’s assets.  After its 2003 invasion, the US eased sanctions against Iraq, and today there are no far-reaching restrictions against Iraq, though certain embargoes and asset freezes on specific entities and individuals linked to the Hussein regime still exist, and “Iraq-related sanctions” remain on the US government sanction program list.

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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