That sanctions on Muslim countries cause mass human suffering is not only inevitable but part of their design. In 2006, the senior Israeli official Dov Weisglass infamously described the purpose of his nation's blockade on Gaza with this candid admission: "'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger." Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman justified the Iran sanctions regime this way: "Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that."
...Some isolated exceptions notwithstanding, the very idea that a regime can be undermined by severely weakening the population that would otherwise oppose it - literally weakening them physically through food and medicine deprivation - is not only intuitively absurd and morally grotesque but also empirically disproven.
Above Quote from Glenn Greenwald's article at the Guardian Iran Sanctions Now Causing Food Insecurity, Mass Suffering Yet again, the US and its allies spread mass human misery though a policy that is as morally indefensible as it is counter-productive By Glenn Greenwald ,"The Guardian" Oct. 9,2012
1953 Iranian coup d'état
Mosaddegh Prime Minister of Iran ousted by CIA /USA/UK/MI5
Note to other nations no nation is permitted to put into power someone who is not approved by the USA or other Western nations.
A short history of Iran and the Iranian citizenry's struggle for national sovereignty and justice against the oppressive American and Western powers who still believe that they have an entitlement to Iran's oil and gas at whatever price the USA and the West decide. The Western Colonial powers and imperialist took control of much of the Middle East including Iran(Persia) in the early part of the twentieth century and still believe that it is up to the West and the USA to determine who is to rule in Iran or any other nation in the Middle east except for Israel. the USA and Europe refuse to recognize the sovereignty of other nations outside the USA and Europe.
MOSADDEGH Former President of Iran ousted by US CIA and British operatives in 1953 replaced by the Shah of Iran .
Uploaded by POUYAN CAPILANO on Oct 12, 2009
tehran iran history
Mitt Romney Lies about NRA & NRA Puts Republican Party Before Gun Rights
Afghans call for US withdrawal from their country
Published on Oct 9, 2012 by PressTVGlobalNews Exhausted and desperate!Every one of these Afghan men wants an end to the U.S-led conflict in their war torn country. .Fayez Khorshid, Press TV, KabulWhat President Obama and the American government is doing to Iran is similar as what Israel has been doing to Gaza which has become a giant concentration camp or it could be compared to what the NAZIS did to the Jewish people in places such as the Warsaw Ghetto . So as Iraq was turned into a death camp prior to the illegal and immoral American invasion and occupation of Iraq. So now Iran has become the new Iraq or the New Gaza or the new Warsaw Ghetto or concentration camp. Meanwhile Americans and their allies still wonder Why they hate us? while they starve an entire nation rain down drones on innocent civilians in other countries and side with anti-government extremists or with despotic regimes in Syria, Libya, Yemen , Bahrain,Saudi Arabia, Lebanon
Starving the citizenry of Iran is under international law a crime against humanity for which Obama and his allies should be made to account for but of course they won't because America does not recognize any authority outside its borders .
Iran is the New Iraq as US and Western Sanctions lead to economic collapse in Iran and dire shortages of food and basic medicine leading to wide spread hunger and starvation . And what is President Obama's reaction to the wide spread suffering and deaths from hunger or lack of medicines is to double down with even harsher sanctions.
The Iranian people are not and should not forget that America is only on Israel's side and on the side of American interests including security and on the side of American corporate interests and ensuring a cheap and plentiful supply of natural resources such as oil and gas. America was not on Iran's side when the American CIA and British operatives in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état ousted the popular and legally elected Prime Minister Mosaddegh who was attempting to ensure that Iran would get a fair deal from the USA and the West regarding its oil and gas sales. Mosaddegh had what Americans see as a crazy idea that the natural resources of Iran belonged to the Iranian people and not to foreign nations or multinational corporations.
The Americans didn't then and do not now give a fig about the Iranian /Persian citizenry and this is just as true about almost every US administration since at least the 1940s. And no matter what steps the Iranian Regime takes to try to compromise with America it will be rejected out of hand. The USA is determined to destroy Iran one way or another using whatever trumped excuses they can find. (see for instance; Mosaddegh and the legacy of Non-Aligned Movement The Islamists and the monarchists might distort the image of Mosaddegh, but not his memory in the hearts of people. 26 Aug 2012)
But America did the same thing to Iraq and they never apologized to the Iraqi people for the deaths of at least 1 and a half million Iraqi citizens and millions still displaced and much of their infrastructure still not up to where it was before the US invasion.from the beginning of the sanctions til today.
The USA may believe everything is better and promising in Iraq but in fact Iraq is in chaos and trying to put itself back together again after the oppressive Regime of Saddam followed by the oppressive occupation by the Americans since 2003 to the present. Obama and the West punishing the Iranian people for having a government the President does not like. It is Iraq all over again as average Iranians are made to suffer to go hungry to have no medicine to help the sick and people children and the aged and weak begin to die off .
So much for America's Christian compassion and abiding by love thy neighbor and even love your enemy . This compassion and love is saved for the churches on Sunday and definitely not for non-Americans
The American people show how insensitive to the suffering and deaths of non Americans and non-Israelis. During the Iraq sanctions after the first Gulf War over 500,000 children died from hunger or lack of medical care or the lack of clean water or electrical power due to the draconian genocidal sanctions placed on Iraq . When the Americans entered Iraq in 2003 they were not greeted as liberators because the Iraqis knew that they were suffering in the preceding ten years not so much because of Saddam but because of the Americans and their Western allies.
Obama order implements Iran sanctions approved by Congress by AP, Oct.9 via Huffpost
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has signed an executive order that carries out new sanctions against Iran that Congress approved and that he signed this summer. The sanctions seek to deter Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program. Iran insists its nuclear development is for peaceful purposes.
White House National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor says stepped up sanction aimed at Iran have — in his words — “produced profound and demonstrable results.”
Congress in August passed legislation that would expand sanctions to target individuals or companies who issue or purchase Iranian debt or who assist the Iranian government in the development or transportation of Iranian oil or its petrochemicals. The order Obama signed Tuesday sets up a framework for implementing the new sanctions.As Glenn Greenwald points out in the article below the sanctions on Iran are causing wide spread suffering of the average Iranian citizens and that this could be considered a crime against humanity and the first stage in a campaign of Genocide as the Americans did with the Iraqis, The Obama plan is to weaken the country and its people , its infrastructure its economy its government and to destroy its civil society and its professional middle class who represent the moderate enemies of the Iranian Regime.
As for the present writer I would argue for Americans this hatred of the Iranian Regime and the Iranian people goes back to the popular Iranian revolution which ousted of one of America's favorite brutal despots the Shah of Iran .
To add insult to injury the supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini stormed the US Embassy and held the American personnel hostage. This situation and crisis might not have occurred or played out in the way that it did if the USA actually lived up to its publicly stated ideals once they could as they say see the writing on the wall should have been on the side of reform and democracy and the popular uprising of the Iranian people rather than as it was on the side of the anti-democracy anti-reform oppressive regime of the Shah. The problem for the Iranian government and people is that no matter what they do it doesn't matter because the Obama administration and the Pentagon and the quisling mainstream Media have convinced a large segment of the American citizenry that the Iranian Regime and those Iranians who support it have been demonized as being the equivalent of Saddam and the Baathist and equivalent to Adolph Hitler and the NAZIS or Stalin or Mao Tse- Tung .
Once this transformation takes place in considering Iran there is little or no chance for compromise since one would be compromising with "Evil" . Given this bigoted demonizing how could anyone trust Iran or its people . Besides the USA has to take up whatever cause Israel supports so that if Israel is determined to isolate and destroy Iran reducing it to the same chaotic state we now see in Libya, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq . Once reduced to this chaotic failed state status these nations are neutralized as a danger to Israel or American and Western interests.
Iran Sanctions Now Causing Food Insecurity, Mass Suffering Yet again, the US and its allies spread mass human misery though a policy that is as morally indefensible as it is counter-productive By Glenn Greenwald ,"The Guardian" Oct. 9,2012
-- 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 [my emphasis]:
"Six years ago, when America and Europe were putting in place the first raft of measures to press Iran to come clean over its nuclear ambitions, the talk was of "smart" sanctions. The West, it was stressed, had no quarrel with the Iranian people—only with a regime that seemed bent on getting a nuclear bomb, or at least the capacity for making one. Yet, as sanctions have become increasingly punitive in the face of Iran's intransigence, it is ordinary Iranians who are paying the price.
"On October 1st and 2nd Iran's rial lost more than 25% of its value against the dollar. Since the end of last year it has depreciated by over 80%, most of that in just the past month. Despite subsidies intended to help the poor, prices for staples, such as milk, bread, rice, yogurt and vegetables, have at least doubled since the beginning of the year. Chicken has become so scarce that when scant supplies become available they prompt riots. On October 3rd police in Tehran fired tear-gas at people demonstrating over the rial's collapse. The city's main bazaar closed because of the impossibility of quoting accurate prices. . . .
"Unemployment is thought to be around three times higher than the official rate of 12%, and millions of unskilled factory workers are on wages well below the official poverty line of 10m rials (about $300) a month."
That sanctions on Muslim countries cause mass human suffering is not only inevitable but part of their design. In 2006, the senior Israeli official Dov Weisglass infamously described the purpose of his nation's blockade on Gaza with this candid admission: "'The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger." Democratic Rep. Brad Sherman justified the Iran sanctions regime this way: "Critics of sanctions argue that these measures will hurt the Iranian people. Quite frankly, we need to do just that."
Even more infamously, the beloved former Democratic Secretary of State Madeleine Albright - when asked in 1996 by 60 Minutes' Lesley Stahl about reports that 500,000 Iraqi children had died as a result of US-imposed sanctions on that country - stoically replied: "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price - we think the price is worth it." So extreme was the suffering caused by sanctions in Iraq that one former UN official, Denis Halliday, resigned in protest, saying that the sanctions policy met the formal definition of "genocide":
"We are now in there responsible for killing people, destroying their families, their children, allowing their older parents to die for lack of basic medicines. We're in there allowing children to die who were not born yet when Saddam Hussein made the mistake of invading Kuwait."
In an excellent Op-Ed for Al Jazeera last week, Murtaza Hussain extensively documented the devastation wrought on 26 million Iraqis by that sanctions regime - the one Albright declared as "worth it" - and argues: "that tragedy is being willfully replayed, only this time the target is the population of Iran". He explained:
"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."
That is a fact that should be deeply disturbing to any decent person. In 2001, the writer Chuck Sudetic visited Iraq and then wrote in Mother Jones about what he saw: namely, that the US-led sanctions regime "killed more civilians than all the chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons used in human history".
Yet as Hussain notes, the decade-long suffering of Iraqis was all futile when viewed next to the ostensible goal of sanctions: "the sanctions failed to remove Saddam from power and by many accounts helped him solidify his grip on the country by keeping the overwhelming majority of the population focused purely on subsistence." Some isolated exceptions notwithstanding, the very idea that a regime can be undermined by severely weakening the population that would otherwise oppose it - literally weakening them physically through food and medicine deprivation - is not only intuitively absurd and morally grotesque but also empirically disproven.
As Mohammad Sadeghi Esfahlani and Jamal Abdi recently documented in Foreign Policy, the sanctions regime, while devastating ordinary Iranians, is having virtually no effect on their leaders - other than to strengthen their grip on power:
"Instead of speculating from afar, we should listen to the Iranians on the ground who are actually struggling for democracy firsthand. The leaders of the Green Movement and Iranian human rights and democracy defenders have adamantly opposed broad sanctions and warned that confrontation, isolation and broad economic punishment only undermine the cause of democracy and rule of law in Iran. A new report by the International Civil Society Action Network (ICAN) documents how sanctions are destroying the sources of societal change in Iran. 'The urban middle class that has historically played a central role in creating change and promoting progress in Iran are key casualties of the sanctions regime,' according to the report.
"As documented by the report's firsthand account on the ground, sanctions are not driving the working class to join Iran's democracy movement, they are doing the opposite - decimating the Iranian middle class, that has been at the center of the democracy movement, by intensifying their economic struggles. The greatest impediment for Iran's pro-democracy movement - as we saw at the height of the Green Movement protests in 2009 - has been that working class Iranians who are preoccupied with immediate financial struggles are unable to enlist in a struggle for political freedoms."
So horrific is the human suffering brought about by such sanctions regimes that some are beginning to argue that killing Iranians with an air attack would be more humane.
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