It has become an article of faith among some to classify economic sanctions as a variation of hot war. Some even get technical and refer to sanctions as prelude to a hot war. And many identify sanction as a useless foreign policy tool which has never worked. Needless to say nothing could be further from the truth.
Believe it or not sanction(s) is an everyday tool of international statecraft; states try to resolve their disputes, mostly economic, through lengthy bilateral and multilateral negotiation, once that does not resolve the issue to their satisfaction one of the first tools they reach for is sanction. In fact were it not for economic sanctions the world would have witnessed hot wars in all places at all times, that it has not been the case is a testament to the utility of sanction.
People do practice sanction in their individual daily lives too. Every time a conveniently located store is bypassed due to bad prior service, that store is being sanctioned. Or when a child’s allowance/T.V. time is temporarily cut to teach him there are consequences to bad behavior, that child is being sanctioned. Here is how Cambridge dictionary defines sanction:
“sanction noun (ORDER) /ˈsæŋk.ʃən/ n • [C usually plural] an official order, such as the stopping of trade, which is taken against a country in order to make it obey international law.
Many nations have imposed sanctions on the country because of its attacks on its own people.Trade/economic sanctions will only be lifted (= stopped) when the aggressor nation withdraws its troops.•
[C] a strong action taken in order to make people obey a law or rule, or a punishment given when they do not obey Without realistic sanctions, some teachers have difficulty keeping order in the classroom.”
By now there should be little doubt about the IRR, the Islamist Rapist Republic attacking its own people. For thirty years it has and for the past three months the world has been witness to it in vivid colors on their T.V. screens. They saw how IRR rooftop sharpshooters randomly picked off peaceful demonstrators for the crime of asking for accountability by IRR. They saw heads smashed, bones being broken and people being violently set upon by roaming armed packs of official Islamist thugs. They also got to see and hear from many rape victims of the IRR’s many detention centers.
That the IRR was found out to be illegally and secretly developing its full cycle dual purpose nuke program with strong indications of it having military application as the ultimate goal is just one additional reason for the sane world to impose airtight sanctions.
Before it is too late and IRR imposes a devastating war on the enslaved Iranian nation and the entire volatile region, the sane world has to impose airtight sanctions and at the same time openly help Iranians with material and moral support to rid the world of this clear and present danger.
