[G]overnments have often used food as a weapon to sway politics. In the 1960s, for instance, the US government halted food aid shipments to Nasserite Egypt in the hope of tempering the country’s revolutionary foreign policy aspirations. It also contemplated food boycotts in retaliation to the 1973 Arab oil embargo and the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. In a more recent and tragic example, Iraq was on the verge of famine by the mid-1990s as a result of the multilateral UN embargo against the country in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War.