30 October, 2012

History Looks to Repeat Itself in Iran

Al Jazeera published a piece by Murtaza Hussain earlier this month called "Sanctioning society: From Iraq to Iran" which is both incredibly sad and infuriating. It begins:

After over three decades of service with the United Nations, working across the world on development and humanitarian assistance projects, in 1998 the UN Chief Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday turned in his resignation to the organisation. Upon spending years in Iraq and bearing witness to the results of the draconian sanctions regime which had turned a modern society into one of the most impoverished on the planet, Halliday wrote that he could no longer continue administering a programme which he said "satisfied the legal definition of genocide".

The piece goes on to note the devastation wrought on Iraq. The Iraqi currency, the dinar, collapsed and economic ruin for millions followed. Many children stopped going to school as they had to enter the labor force to help their families survive. An embargo on medical supplies demolished what was one of the best healthcare systems in the Middle East. Infant mortality increased more than fourfold and diseases like typhoid and malaria ran rampant. And so on.

Now America seems intent on laying waste to the citizens of Iran in the same manner.

Intensifying sanctions against the country have sent the Iran's rial into an unprecedented 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 effectively ground to a halt as the sudden and unprecedented 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 effects of months of steadily tightening sanctions have also begun to take their toll on the Iranian healthcare system; and as in any case of warfare, economic or otherwise, it is the poorest citizens who have borne the brunt of the suffering. 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.

In the disbelieving words of one Iranian woman, a mother to 12-year-old boy with haemophilia who is now facing the amputation of his left leg and whose life doctors' say is threatened by continuous nosebleeds due to an acute national shortage of anti-clotting drugs, regarding sanctions: "no human beings can be so brutal to patients".

As Barack Obama has been fond of saying, oh yes we can! Obama boasted in one of the presidential debates, "We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy. Their currency has dropped 80 percent. Their oil production has plunged to the lowest level since they were fighting a war with Iraq 20 years ago. So their economy is in a shambles." Of course, there's no mention of 12-year olds having their limbs amputated because of those sanctions or of any suffering on the part of ordinary Iranians. Whenever the crash of 2008 is described here in the U.S., our media note the effect it had on ordinary Americans – losing jobs, drowning in debt, and so on – but we dare not do the same thing when we and our allies intentionally set out to destroy another country's economy. Hussain notes, "Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), the goal of the sanctions should explicitly be to 'take the food out of the mouths of the [Iranian] citizens'." He also quotes Democrat Brad Sherman: "House Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA), has said 'Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that.'"

Yes, because sanctions really did the trick in Iraq. When I read about a crippled economy and hyperinflation I think about the Weimar Republic. If you were an Iranian and you hear Barack Obama bragging about the misery being imposed upon your country (by the United States and Europe) and you hear American congressmen advocating for food to be taken from you and your family, for you and your family to be hurt, how would you feel? How would it feel to hear those words coming from the leaders of a country that helped overthrow a democratically elected government in your country and supported a country that invaded yours?

It seems like most Americans, even those of the bleeding heart liberal variety, have no interest in the implications of our foreign policy in Iran (nor probably in our foreign policy at all). How many of us actually know much of anything about Iran beyond its status as part of George Bush II's Axis of Evil?

Take a look at these pictures of Iran and Iranians. If they were shown to you out of the blue and asked where they were taken, would Iran ever come to mind?






With all the hoopla surrounding Ahmadinejad's comment supposedly saying that Israel should be wiped off the map and anti-semitism generally, Jews have a guaranteed seat in the Iranian Parliament. And, if this video is anything to go by, Jews are not exactly a persecuted minority. One Iranian Jew says that "Iran has the greatest population of Jews in the Middle East after Israel."



Take a listen to the wonderful BBC radio documentary Through Persian Eyes. Read a book like Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes to get an idea of the history of relationship between the West and the Middle East and between the United States and Iran. Looking back at history, try to view the situation from an Iranian point of view. The Iranian people showed great sympathy for Americans in the wake of 9/11 and then their country was labeled part of the "Axis of Evil" and now they are suffering because of sanctions and being threatened. (Obama: "As long as I am president of the United States, Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.") You can't blame them for wanting nuclear weapons. (Then again, we've been crying wolf over the prospect of Iran having such things since Jimmy Carter was president.) I would sure as hell want one. Israel has nukes. The U.S. invaded Iraq on its western border and Afghanistan on its eastern one. There are drones aplenty, the U.S. is leading an armada to the Persian Gulf, and it has been soliciting England for permission to use airbases in the UK and in UK territories in its standoff with Iran. The United States and Israel wage cyber-warfare against Iran. And the U.S. sells billions of dollars worth of advanced armaments to Saudi Arabia, a country hostile to Iran. Who is the aggressor here?

None of this is to say that I think the Iranian government is composed of saints. But maybe, just maybe we could try to understand a little about Iran and their perspective before accepting the apocalyptic proclamations of politicians, all of the demonizing, the sanctions and their attendant misery, and bombing the place.


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