Chris Toensing, “Wilful Blindness,” Middle East Report, Summer 2010  MERIP review (pdf)

The fact, as Gordon demonstrates unimpeachably, is that successive US administrations knew the scope of the humanitarian catastrophe in Iraq and refused to consider that their ends might not justify the means. Gordon’s training as a philosopher shines through in her strongest chapter, a meditation upon US guilt of genocide or crimes against humanity that concludes with the lament that Washington cannot be held accountable because international law does not criminalize “willful blindness.” Gordon captures an important part of the tragedy that is the story of Iraq in the sanctions era. The US got away with a murderously cynical policy because, as the sole superpower, it could.

  Andrew Cockburn,”Worth It,” London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 14, 22 July 2010: 

“Even at the time, the sanctions against Iraq drew only sporadic public comment, and even less attention was paid to the bureaucratic manoeuvres in Washington, always with the dutiful assistance of London, which ensured the deaths of half a million children, among other consequences. In her excellent book Joy Gordon charts these in horrifying detail” 

   ”In one of the bitter ironies of our time, the UN Security Council—under the influence of the United States—destroyed a country in order to save it from its leader. In vividly portraying and thoroughly documenting the history of the Western decapitation of Iraq through economic sanctions Joy Gordon fills a huge gap in the literature. Her penetrating research reveals the purposefulness of punishment, complicity, rationalization, and outright deception as standard practice in the role played by the United States, which lacked critical self-reflection and any clear sense of rules or the relationship between means and ends. This book will become a foreign affairs classic.”
—George A. Lopez, author of The Sanctions Decade 

 ”In a powerful, original book, Gordon offers the most sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of the origins, administration, and impact of the Iraq sanctions regime. This is a damning account of how international administration was used by the U.S. and the UK for policy ends. Despite the rhetoric of humanitarianism, the sanctions were, in Gordon’s term, a humanitarian catastrophe.”
—Neta C. Crawford, Boston University 

 ”For a decade, Gordon has scoured UN and U.S. documents, interviewing officials of all ranks in her attempt to understand the engine rooms of the Iraq sanctions. The result is one of the most extensively researched books on the sanctions, a detailed account of how U.S. officials and diplomats brought about one of the 1990s’ worst humanitarian crises. ”
—Colin Rowat, University of Birmingham 

 ”This profoundly troubling story about U.S. foreign policy under three administrations reveals the shameful manner in which the United States relentlessly subverted the UN sanctions regime for Iraq, twisting it toward a purpose not approved by the Security Council. It is time Americans knew of the cruelty inflicted on Iraqis in our name behind closed doors at the UN in one of the morally most disastrous foreign policy decisions in American history. Gordon has documented it, calmly, courageously, meticulously, and convincingly.”
—Henry Shue, University of Oxford, author of Basic Rights 

“Gordon dissects U.S. policies and practices in forensic detail. It is a chilling, and telling, tale of how a complex and sophisticated bureaucracy, given an overriding security remit, could be content not merely to allow a humanitarian tragedy to take place but indeed to help to create it, not by active malevolence but through indifference.”
—Sir Harold Walker, former British Ambassador to Iraq 

 ”A superb critique of the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq, which were imposed for twelve years, with disastrous humanitarian consequences for the civilian population. This wonderfully researched and written book has profound implications for ongoing assessments of American foreign policy, and deserves to be widely read, its argument absorbed at the highest levels of government.”
—Richard Falk, Princeton University, emeritus