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Thursday
September 6, 2001

Failed policy

Recently, an interesting letter in The Iranian ["Top priority?"] asked why there hasn't been a debate on the utility of U.S. sanctions in promoting human rights and democracy, since, according to the theory mentioned in the letter, by hurting Iranians the sanctions will eventually cause them to overthrow their regime.

You would think that the thirty-plus years of U.S. sanctions imposed on Cuba should be more than sufficient to dismiss this theory that "Hurting Iranians will eventually hurt the mollahs." And note that neither Iraq nor Libya are exactly shining beacons of liberty either, despite undergoing many years of sanctions (multilateral ones at that.)

However, leaving aside the merits of the theory itself (or lack thereof), the letter asked why there hasn't been a debate about it, which is a separate issue. For that, there are several related answers:

For one thing, the real reason why there hasn't been much debate about the use of sanctions to promote human rights or democracy is because the U.S. sanctions on Iran obviously have nothing to do with democracy or human rights. They never did, and they never will. Rather, the sanctions are primarily intended to subjugate Iran to Israel, which is why the three standard U.S. complaints about Iran - support for "terrorism", opposition to the "peace process", manufacture of "weapons of mass destruction" - are all issues which involve opposition to Israel's regional ambitions, and have nothing to do with Iran's democractic or human rights situation. That is also why AIPAC and other pro-Israeli lobby groups are so active in promoting the sanctions and work so hard to prevent any U.S.-Iran rapprochement.

Secondly, the suggestion that U.S. sanctions can promote human rights or democracy is based on the extremely naive assumption that the US is a goody-two-shoes out to spread democracy in the world. In fact, the US is a self-interested super-power, and despite all the pretty propaganda about democracy and human rights, historically speaking the United States has consistenly opposed the development of representative governments in places such as Iran. After all, if people in "those sorts" of countries start running their own affairs . . . who knows! Next they'll want to do something silly like take possession of their own oil industry too . . . and the U.S. didn't like that sort of thing very much, now did it?

Furthermore, if the promotion of human rights or democracy <i>is</i> ever proclaimed to be the goal of U.S. sanctions, then it would also become painfully obvious that the US should also be sanctioning Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, and a whole lot of other US-backed tin-pot dictatorships and repressive regimes around the world, instead of singling out Iran. That's a bit of embarrassment the U.S. can do without.

Ultimately, the U.S. sanctions on Iran will no doubt continue under their own intertia, because no American politican is brave enough to openly admit to having pursued a failed policy on Iran (especially when it won't help them win the next election), because having Iran as a "rogue state" is convenient for the U.S. military, U.S. weapons manufacturers, and other fear-mongers who need a regular cast of bad guys to scare up tax-payer dollars for their pet programs, and because Israel will continue to manipulate US foreign policy as it has for years.

In any case, the bottom line is that the U.S. currently lacks the moral credibility to lecture Iranians about human rights or democracy. Any debate about the utility of sanctions to promote human rights or democracy is therefore dead-on-arrival. Neither democracy nor human rights can be coercively induced from abroad by a self-interested super-power whose rank hypocricy on these same issues is daily on display for any observer with even a mild interest in Mideast affairs.

J. Mohammadi

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