No Attack on Iran
Bruce Ramsey
The sanctions on Iran make little sense. Sanctions rarely get a country to do anything that it believes to be against its interests. They have not moved the governments of Cuba or North Korea. Liberals often argue that the U.S. sanctions on South Africa led to the end of apartheid, but in my reading of it, sanctions were a minor influence. The whites gave up in South Africa because the white leader, F.W. de Klerk, saw that it was in the whites’ interest to reach a deal, and because the imprisoned black leader, Nelson Mandela, was willing to deal with him. It came down to the reasonableness of two men.
Sanctions are economic. And political leaders do not give away important political goals for economic gain.
I attended a forum Dec. 16 at Town Hall organized by opponents of sanctions. There were three speakers: Muhammad Sahimi, professor of chemical engineering at the University of California; Ian Lustick, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, and Keith Weissman, former deputy director of AIPAC, the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee.
The sanctions on Iran are mainly in defense of Israel. Lustick argued, “There is no strategic military threat to Israel” in Iran getting the bomb. If Iran is really trying to build a nuclear bomb—and Lustick said, “I assume they are”—it is not to drop on Israel, which has its own bombs and would drop them on Iran. Iran wants the bomb as a deterrent, which is the same reason Israel has.
Muhammad Sahini, an ethnic Iranian, agreed with that point. He said, “The lesson of George W. Bush invading Iraq and leaving North Korea alone is that if you have a nuclear bomb, the United States will leave you alone.”
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