"We are putting major additional Sanctions on Iran on Monday," President Trump tweeted today. "I look forward to the day that Sanctions come off Iran, and they become a productive and prosperous nation
again - The sooner the better!"
Iran's economy is already floundering due to the steadily mounting sanctions that the Trump administration has been heaping upon it since its withdrawal from the JCPOA last year. Crucial goods are
four times the price they used to be, sick Iranians are having difficulty obtaining life-saving medicine, and life in general has been getting much more difficult for the poorest and frailest Iranian civilians.
For this reason, it is a very safe bet that there have been Iranians who have died because of the sanctions. Being
unable to obtain enough life-saving medicine will inevitably increase mortality rates, as will inadequate nutrition and
care for those whose health is at risk. There's not really any way around that, and it's only going to get worse.
And that's exactly what was supposed to happen. As far as their intended purpose is concerned, the sanctions are
working. They're doing exactly what they were intended to do: hurt Iranian civilians.
How do I know this? Well for one thing America's Secretary of State has said it openly. The New York Times reports the following:
Last week, Mr. Pompeo acknowledged to Michael J. Morrell, a former acting director of the C.I.A., that the
administration’s strategy would not persuade Iranian leaders to change their behavior.
“I think what can change is the people can change the government,” he said on a podcast hosted by Mr. Morrell, in what
appeared to be an endorsement of regime change.
The Trump administration isn't leveling these sanctions because it believes they'll cause Tehran to capitulate to
Washington's impossible list of demands; they know full well that that will never happen. What they claim, based on no evidence or historical precedent
whatsoever, is that by making life so painful for the hungry and malnourished Iranian people they'll be forced to rise
up against their government to effect regime change themselves.
Can you think of anything more sociopathic than this? Off the top of my head, I personally cannot.
Starvation sanctions kill people. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans have reportedly already died as a result of this administration's relentless assault on their economy; those human beings are no less dead than they
would have been if the US had killed them by dropping cluster bombs on Caracas. Yet these deaths have received virtually
no mainstream media coverage, and Americans, while they strongly oppose attacking Iran militarily, have had very little to say about Trump's attacks on the nation's economy. The economy which people use to feed their
children, to care for their elderly and their sick.
I'm titling this essay "Starvation Sanctions Are Worse Than Overt Warfare", and I mean it. I am not saying that
starvation sanctions are more destructive or deadly than overt military force in and of themselves; what I am saying is
that the overall effect is worse, because there's no public accountability for them and because they deliberately target
civilians.
If the US were to launch a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into an Iranian suburb with the goal of killing civilians,
there'd be international outrage and the cohesion of the US-centralized power alliance would take a major hit. Virtually
everyone would recognize this as an unforgivable war crime. Yet America will be able to kill the same number of
civilians with the same deliberate intention of inflicting deadly force, and it would suffer essentially no consequences
at all. There's no public or international pressure holding that form of violence at bay, because it's invisible and
poorly understood.
It reminds me of the way financial abuse gets overlooked and under-appreciated in our society. Financial abuse can be
more painful and imprisoning than physical or psychological abuse (and I speak from experience), especially if you have
children, yet you don't generally see movies and TV shows getting made about it. In a society where people have been
made to depend on money for survival, limiting or cutting off their access to it is the same as any other violent attack
upon their personal sovereignty, and can easily be just as destructive. But as a society we haven't yet learned to see
and understand this violence, so it doesn't attract interest and attention. That lack of interest and attention enables
the empire to launch deadly campaigns targeting civilian populations unnoticed, without any public accountability.
We must as a society evolve our understanding of what sanctions are and what they do, and stop seeing them as in any way
superior or preferable to overt warfare.
The fact that people generally oppose senseless military violence but are unable to see and comprehend a slow, boa
constrictor-like act of slaughter via economic strangulation is why these siege warfare tactics have become the weapon
of choice for the US-centralized empire. It is a more gradual way of murdering people than overt warfare, but when you
control all the resources and have an underlying power structure which maintains itself amid the comings and goings of
your officially elected government, you're in no hurry. The absence of any public accountability makes the need for
patience a very worthwhile trade-off.
So you see this siege warfare strategy employed everywhere by the US-centralized empire:
• You see it with Iran and Venezuela.
•
• You see it in Yemen, where in addition to deadly blockades the Saudis have been deliberate targeting farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites and cholera treatment centers with US-assisted airstrikes.
•
• You see it in North Korea, where boats full of dead people have been washing up on Japan's shores because fishermen get stuck out at sea trying to catch food since they can't afford enough fuel to get back to shore,
which former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson attributed to US sanctions.
•
• You see it in Gaza, where people are being deprived of an adequate amount of nutrients due to an Israeli blockade designed to "put the Palestinians on a diet".
•
• You saw it with Julian Assange, where Ecuador collaborated with the US to slowly make life in the embassy more and more hellish in the hope that he'd
step outside to be arrested by British police.
•
• You're seeing it now with Chelsea Manning, who is currently racking up $500 a day fines for her principled stand against a corrupt grand jury proceeding against
Assange, fines which will double next month to $1,000 a day.
•
The US-centralized power alliance is so powerful in its ability to hurt nations with financial influence that in 1990
when Yemen voted against a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing the attack against Iran, a senior US diplomat was
caught on a hot mic telling the Yemeni ambassador, "That will be the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." According
to German author Thomas Pogge, "The US stopped $70 million in aid to Yemen; other Western countries, the IMF, and World Bank followed suit. Saudi
Arabia expelled some 800,000 Yemeni workers, many of whom had lived there for years and were sending urgently needed
money to their families."
That's real power. Not the ability to destroy a nation with bombs and missiles, but the ability to destroy it without
firing a shot.
It's no wonder, then, that the drivers of this empire work so hard to continue growing and expanding it. The oligarchs
and their allies in opaque government agencies no doubt envision a world where all noncompliant nations like Iran,
Russia and China have been absorbed into the blob of empire and war becomes obsolete, not because anyone has become any
less violent, but because their economic control will be so complete that they can obliterate entire populations just by
cutting them off from the world economy whenever any of them become disobedient.
This is the only reason Iran is being targeted right now. That's why you'll never hear a factually and logically sound
argument defending Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal; there is none. There was no problem with the JCPOA other
than the fact that it barred America from inflicting economic warfare upon Iran, which it needed for the purpose of
toppling the nation's government so that it can be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire.
And all the innocent human beings who die of starvation and disease? They don't matter. Imperial violence only matters
if there are consequences for it. The price of shoring up the total hegemony of the empire will have been worth it.
_______________________________
The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing
list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I'm trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.