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Sanctions Madness

The United States and the West must unite as never before. Although in the past blunt economic sanctions have hurt the average Iranian, it is now imperative that America and its allies adopt ever more stringent, focused sanctions to bring this regime to its knees as quickly as possible. The world should use available financial […]

The United States and the West must unite as never before. Although in the past blunt economic sanctions have hurt the average Iranian, it is now imperative that America and its allies adopt ever more stringent, focused sanctions to bring this regime to its knees as quickly as possible. The world should use available financial sanctions to precipitate a run on the Iranian rial and cause the collapse of the Iranian economy. It is better that the Iranian people suffer for a short period of time and regain their freedom and prosperity than for them to suffer under this regime with the complicity of the Western world for years to come. ~Hossein Askari

This is madness. Have the current sanctions brought the regime anywhere close to its knees after decades? There is not a single example where economic sanctions actually compelled a non-democratic regime to change course on an internal political matter. We have no reason to believe that it will work. What we do know is that it will make average Iranians poorer. The nascent Iranian middle class that everyone is so pleased with will be impoverished, and their economic prospects will go from bad to worse. Causing a run on the rial would annihilate whatever savings average Iranians have and magnify their current inflation problem, which could have a political radicalizing effect and not one that we would find attractive. Tanking the Iranian economy would mean that unemployment shoots up even higher than the already miserable 20%+ that it is now.

That’s assuming that the things Askari proposes could actually be done. What sanctions do we seriously think we can impose at this point that would have a desirable effect? Suppose that we somehow got every major power and all of Iran’s trading partners on board. In that unlikely event, how would starving the Iranian people of goods and contacts with the outside world make them more capable of throwing off the regime’s yoke? How long is the “short period of time” during which the worsened suffering of the Iranian people is tolerable? Sanctions hurt the weakest and most vulnerable first, and they affect the powerful and wealthiest last. Leaving aside the question of whether it “works” in five or ten years’ time, how is such a policy remotely just? For twelve years I heard the immoral argument that Hussein was somehow “making” us impose the sanctions on Iraq, and that all of the human suffering we were inflicting was really not our responsibility. For how many years would we be willing to go through the motions of the same ineffective and immoral policy with Iran? Why are so many advocates of engagement and rapprochement so lacking in confidence in their own ideas about what a sound Iran policy would look like?

Why would such an imposition of sanctions not allow the authorities to claim the mantle of nationalist resistance against international hostility? Milosevic held on for years longer than he would have been able to do otherwise because of the hostility towards Serbia that most of the world showed in the ’90s. Why would imposing extremely tight sanctions not put the protesters on the defensive and blunt their earlier criticism about Iranian economic grievances? As bad as the government’s mismanagement and corruption undoubtedly are, economic conditions can always get worse under tightened international sanctions, and the regime will be able to argue truthfully that conditions have worsened because of policies advanced by Washington.

Of course, we all know that there are states that have no interest in sacrificing their business with Iran for the sake of causing internal political change. Russia and China, and perhaps the two other members of the so-called BRIC, have no desire to lend support to an effort to police the internal affairs of another state. Even though they are too large and important to the global economy to risk the same treatment, these powers have no reason to want to provide a precedent that could be applied to their clients elsewhere in the world. If they could be imposed, how would tightened sanctions affect the regional economy and the oil market? People propose these outlandish policies and don’t even bother to address their possible consequences. We are still in global recession. How much worse are the chances for recovery if Iranian oil exports are targeted with sanctions and the price of oil shoots up past $100 again?

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