In 1998 the UN Chief Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday resigned. Halliday explained that he could no longer continue administering a programme which he said "satisfied the legal definition of genocide".
He later wote "My innate sense of justice was and still is outraged by the violence that UN sanctions have brought upon and continues to bring upon, the lives of children, families - the extended families, the loved ones of Iraq. There is no justification for killing the young people of Iraq, not the aged, not the sick, not the rich, not the poor. Some will tell you that the leadership is punishing the Iraqi people. That is not my perception, or experience from living in Baghdad. And were that to be the case - how can that possibly justify further punishment, in fact collective punishment, by the United Nations?"
While the sanctions failed to topple Saddam from power and by many accounts helped him solidify his grip on the country they took a devastating toll on Iraqi civilians.
This time the target for sanctions is the population of Iran which has sent the Iran's rial into a free-fall, causing it to plummet in value by 75 per cent since the start of the year; and, stunningly, almost 60 per cent in the past week alone. Ordinary Iranians completely unconnected to the government have had their lives effected as the sudden and collapse of the financial system has rendered any meaningful form of commerce effectively impossible. In recent weeks, the price of staples such as rice and cooking oil have skyrocketed and once ubiquitous foods such as chicken have been rendered completely out of the reach of the average citizen. The poorest citizens who have borne the brunt of the suffering. The people of Iran will suffer potentially catastrophic harm as Iraqis did a decade earlier.
These impacts upon ordinary Iranian civilians are exactly what sanctions advocates had been hoping to engineer. One of the goals of sanctions is to forcibly coerce Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government. In the words of a leading advocate and architect of the policy, Senator Mark Kirk, the goal of the sanctions should explicitly be to "take the food out of the mouths of the [Iranian] citizens". Another leading proponent, House Representative Brad Sherman, has said "Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that." Kirk has also stated his position that the objective of the sanctions should be to collapse the Iranian economy until it "becomes like North Korea", where millions have starved to death in recent years due to crippling food shortages and the breakdown of national infrastructure.
Iranian doctors have already begun to report shortages in essential medicines such as those used for cancer, heart and multiple sclerosis patients, and the situation is forecasted to get worse as financial sanctions make the purchasing pharmaceuticals from abroad an effective impossibility.
Those advocating sanctions against Iran are waging war against the Iranian people, despite the broad consensus that sanctions only serve to immiserate innocent civilians while consolidating the hold on society of the governing regime. The Iranian state grows increasingly repressive and empowered relative to a poor and destitute population. Look at the U.S. government’s embargo against Cuba. It’s gone on for some 50 years. Its goal? To squeeze the Cuban citizenry so hard economically that they finally decide to oust Fidel Castro (and Raul Castro) from power and install another pro-U.S. dictator into power. Needless to say, the Cuban embargo has still not succeeded in effecting regime change. The embargo has simply ensured that the Cuban people remain in desperate poverty.
The blunt instrument of untargeted sanctions against a country are not an alternative to war but a form of war more pernicious in that the victims are always necessarily the weakest and most vulnerable of society. Meanwhile, the Iranian people suffer, just as the Iraqi people suffered. They are merely the means to achieve the end, which is regime change. In the minds of U.S. officials, any amount of death and suffering among the people of the targeted country is worth regime change. As former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright declared, the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children certainly were worth it. That’s the way U.S. officials feel today about the suffering their sanctions are bringing to the Iranian people. If the millions who had their lives destroyed and ended in Iraq were not to have died in vain, the same crime against humanity which they suffered must not be repeated today against the people of Iran.
Adapted from an Al Jazeera article by Murtaza Hussain here
He later wote "My innate sense of justice was and still is outraged by the violence that UN sanctions have brought upon and continues to bring upon, the lives of children, families - the extended families, the loved ones of Iraq. There is no justification for killing the young people of Iraq, not the aged, not the sick, not the rich, not the poor. Some will tell you that the leadership is punishing the Iraqi people. That is not my perception, or experience from living in Baghdad. And were that to be the case - how can that possibly justify further punishment, in fact collective punishment, by the United Nations?"
While the sanctions failed to topple Saddam from power and by many accounts helped him solidify his grip on the country they took a devastating toll on Iraqi civilians.
This time the target for sanctions is the population of Iran which has sent the Iran's rial into a free-fall, causing it to plummet in value by 75 per cent since the start of the year; and, stunningly, almost 60 per cent in the past week alone. Ordinary Iranians completely unconnected to the government have had their lives effected as the sudden and collapse of the financial system has rendered any meaningful form of commerce effectively impossible. In recent weeks, the price of staples such as rice and cooking oil have skyrocketed and once ubiquitous foods such as chicken have been rendered completely out of the reach of the average citizen. The poorest citizens who have borne the brunt of the suffering. The people of Iran will suffer potentially catastrophic harm as Iraqis did a decade earlier.
These impacts upon ordinary Iranian civilians are exactly what sanctions advocates had been hoping to engineer. One of the goals of sanctions is to forcibly coerce Iranians to rise up and overthrow their government. In the words of a leading advocate and architect of the policy, Senator Mark Kirk, the goal of the sanctions should explicitly be to "take the food out of the mouths of the [Iranian] citizens". Another leading proponent, House Representative Brad Sherman, has said "Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that." Kirk has also stated his position that the objective of the sanctions should be to collapse the Iranian economy until it "becomes like North Korea", where millions have starved to death in recent years due to crippling food shortages and the breakdown of national infrastructure.
Iranian doctors have already begun to report shortages in essential medicines such as those used for cancer, heart and multiple sclerosis patients, and the situation is forecasted to get worse as financial sanctions make the purchasing pharmaceuticals from abroad an effective impossibility.
Those advocating sanctions against Iran are waging war against the Iranian people, despite the broad consensus that sanctions only serve to immiserate innocent civilians while consolidating the hold on society of the governing regime. The Iranian state grows increasingly repressive and empowered relative to a poor and destitute population. Look at the U.S. government’s embargo against Cuba. It’s gone on for some 50 years. Its goal? To squeeze the Cuban citizenry so hard economically that they finally decide to oust Fidel Castro (and Raul Castro) from power and install another pro-U.S. dictator into power. Needless to say, the Cuban embargo has still not succeeded in effecting regime change. The embargo has simply ensured that the Cuban people remain in desperate poverty.
The blunt instrument of untargeted sanctions against a country are not an alternative to war but a form of war more pernicious in that the victims are always necessarily the weakest and most vulnerable of society. Meanwhile, the Iranian people suffer, just as the Iraqi people suffered. They are merely the means to achieve the end, which is regime change. In the minds of U.S. officials, any amount of death and suffering among the people of the targeted country is worth regime change. As former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Madeleine Albright declared, the deaths of half-a-million Iraqi children certainly were worth it. That’s the way U.S. officials feel today about the suffering their sanctions are bringing to the Iranian people. If the millions who had their lives destroyed and ended in Iraq were not to have died in vain, the same crime against humanity which they suffered must not be repeated today against the people of Iran.
Adapted from an Al Jazeera article by Murtaza Hussain here
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The Economist this week describes the intensifying suffering of 75 million Iranian citizens as a result of the sanctions regime being imposed on them by the US and its allies "it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the price."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/07/iran-santions-suffering
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