Iran Policy: Morally and Effectively Bankrupt

During the campaign debates between the major party presidential candidates, the two candidates essentially agreed on almost every subject. Romney claimed that Obama’s policies had failed and then announced that he would follow the same failed policies. On Iran the only disagreement was who would be the tougher president. Under Obama, the U.S. has engaged in economic warfare by imposing a unilateral sanctions regime and has strong armed other countries into abiding by the sanctions. The resulting economic dislocation, aggravated by mismanagement by the Iranian government, has had a significant impact on the economy. Oil exports have plummeted, contributing to a precipitous decline in the value of the rial. This decline, along with financial restrictions on marine insurance and funds transfer , have contributed to rising inflation and have made it difficult to import even essential goods such as medical equipment and drugs.

Despite all of the political noise, there has been almost no discussion about whether or not the sanctions policy is being effective in achieving its objectives and no discussion about the morality of economic warfare on the Iranian people.

Following the First Gulf War, the U.S. and its allies imposed draconian sanctions on Iraq designed to “punish the Iraqi people”. These sanctions destroyed the Iraqi healthcare and educational systems and resulted in hundreds of thousands of unnecessary Iraqi deaths. (See here) Madeleine Albright (then US UN ambassador) declared on 60 Minutes that “the price is worth it”. In 1998 Denis Halliday, the UN administrator of the oil-for-food program, resigned to protest the sanctions saying, “We are in the process of destroying an entire country” and calling them “nothing less than genocide’. His replacement, Hans von Sponeck, resigned in 2000 denouncing the sanctions as “criminal policy”. (See here) As we head down the same path in Iran, the same descriptions apply.

The stated objectives behind the sanctions on Iran have been variously stated to be: to force Iran to abandon or change its nuclear program or to provoke civil unrest resulting in the overthrow of the Iranian government. The decade long enhanced sanctions regime has accomplished neither of these objectives. In the past decade, Iran has gone from a small number of centrifuges creating a small amount of low enriched uranium to thousands of centrifuges creating a large amount of 20% enriched uranium. The regime has withstood the large demonstrations surrounding the 2009 elections.

While accurate polling in Iran by western pollsters is difficult, it is not impossible. Recent polls show that there is little appetite for regime change. 85% of Iranians say it is important for Iran to have a civilian nuclear program. 65% blamed the worsening economy on western sanctions and only 11% on government mismanagement. 76% have an unfavorable view of the US. These and other results (See here) show that the theory that, if pressured enough, Iranians will rise against their government is wrong. Secondly, the more Iranians suffer, the more they blame those imposing the sanctions and not their own government.

It is time for our political leaders, whoever they may be, to rethink the Iran policy on which they so much agree.

Technorati Tags: Iran,Iran Sanctions

A recipe for genocide

I have taken a brief vacation from blogging while traveling in Africa. Some was enforced vacation as internet access in the bush was pretty limited. As usual, upon my return from an enforced vacation from news and information, not much has changed. The same old intractable problems that were there three weeks ago are still here today. In these poorest countries in the world, just getting through the day is an accomplishment in itself. People have little time to concern themselves with big power politics and the ramifications of big power decisions for world peace. One of our stops was Rwanda, the isolated mountainous “Switzerland of Africa”. Although we were there to see the endangered Mountain Gorillas, it quickly became clear that even in this country only thirteen years separated from a genocide that killed over 1 million people in three months, big power political agendas affect peoples lives. Rwanda is a beautiful country of intense cultivation on steep mountain slopes. The people are lovely and friendly. One is left to wonder how these people could kill 1 million of their friends and neighbors in just three months. A visit to the Genocide Memorial yields a tale of the introduction of European imperialist racism into a culture that had existed for hundreds of years. Until the Europeans arrived Hutus and Tutsis were divided by economics and class. Wealth was measured by the number of cattle that you owned. (In the US we measure it by the number of cars or houses that you own) Tutsis were those that owned more than ten cows. The Europeans inserted the idea that one group was superior and more deserving than another that over time escalated into a civil war. As it appeared that the Tutsis were about to prevail in the conflict, France, under Francois Mitterand, decided to intervene on behalf of the Hutus. This intervention gave the Hutus the ability and the means to obliterate 1 million Tutsis and Hutus who would not participate. Our guide was a Hutu whose whole family was killed by his best friend because they would not participate in the murder of their neighbors. The resulting enmity toward France is palpable in this former French/Belgian protectorate. Perhaps we can learn something from this tragedy about the perils of big powers trying to impose their agendas and decide who the “good guys” are in civil conflicts that we don’t understand. The unintended consequences can be disastrous. Recent events, however, seems to indicate that these lessons have not been learned. In Somalia the US has intervened on behalf of the warlords and Ethiopian invaders against the Islamic Courts. These are the same warlords that we were fighting in the 1990’s and who have pillaged the “country” since then. In Palestine the US is arming Fatah in their domestic political conflict with Hamas. (To hear a chilling description by Laila el Haddad of her discussion with a leader of the Fatah death squads click here) Ryszard Kapusinski, a Polish journalist who spent over 25 years in Africa, writes in “The Shadow of the Sun”: “That is how the Rwandan drama is engendered, the tragedy of the Banyrwanda nation born of an almost Israeli-Palestinian inability to reconcile the interests of two social groups laying claim to the same scrap of land, too small and confined to accommodate them both. Within this drama is spawned the temptation, at first weak and vague, but with the passing years, ever more clear and insistent, of the “Endlosung” – a final solution.” Take a civil conflict, add dose of big power politics and simmer over increasing heat for a number of years and we may have a recipe for a “final solution”.